OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

ADDRESSKS DELIVERED IN AMERICA 



SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH 



KT., D.D., LL.D., LITT. D. 




Class. 
Book. 



Copyiiglit]\'^._ 



COFHRIGHT DEPOSm 



OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 
SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH 



OUR 
COMMON CONSCIENCE 



ADDRESSES DELIVERED IN AMERICA 
DURING THE GREAT WAR 



BY 

SIR GEORGE ADAM SMITH 

Kt., D.D., LL.D., Litt.D." 

VICE-CBANCEIXOR and PsINCIFAL 07 THE UNIVERSITY OF AbEKDEEN 

AND Honorary Chaplain in the Territorial 
Force ox the Brhish Aruy 




NEW ^^SfT YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



i^^lh 



Copyright, 1919, 
By George E. Doran Company 



Printed in the United States of America 

/ 



\\: 



MAR "4 i9!9 

(5) CI. An 12 4^3 



TO 

OUR DEAR SONS 
WHO FELL FIGHTING FOR THE CAUSE 

GEORGE BUCHANAN SMITH 

SECOND LIEUTENANT GORDON HIGHLANDEES 

IN THE BATTLE OF LOOS 

25 SEPTEMBER 191S 

AND 

ROBERT DUNLOP SMITH 

CAPTAIN ^.^RD PUNJABIS INDIAN ARMY 

AT Beaumont's post ngaura river east Africa 
12 JUNE 191 7 

Thine they were, and they have kept Thy word 



INTRODUCTION 

In the first of the following addresses I have 
explained the origins of the mission on which they 
were delivered. That mission was begun in New 
York on the 2nd of April, 191 8, and with two 
brief intervals was continued daily till the middle 
of July, after which I had a few further engage- 
ments before my return from America in the end 
of August. The programme of the necessary 
tours was drawn up by the executive of the Na- 
tional Committee (of the United States) on the 
Churches and Moral Aims of the War — of which 
Mr. Holt is chairman, and ex-President Taft, the 
Hon. Alton B. Parker, and other representative 
Americans are members, and by their secretary, 
Mr. Henry A. Atkinson, to whom, with his assist- 
ant, Mr. L. Gordon, and Dr. Frederick Lynch of 
the "League to Enforce Peace" by winning the 
war, I have many reasons to be very grateful. 
Their admirable plans were carried out in co- 
operation with local committees, chambers of 



viii INTRODUCTION 

commerce, mercantile clubs, universities, and fed- 
erations of ministers of religion, in the thirty-nine 
or so large cities and other places visited. Some- 
times I spoke alone, but usually along with an- 
other speaker, an American. We addressed in all 
127 meetings, for the most part of two kinds — 
either "Conferences" with business men or min- 
isters or with both, varying in size from 80 or 100 
to 600 or 700, at which after the speeches ques- 
tions were put and answered; or, in the evening, 
"Mass Meetings," from 1000 up to 3500 and 
4000, to hear addresses interspersed with patriotic 
music. To reach all these, scattered over the 
States as they were from New York to San Fran- 
cisco and San Diego and from Detroit to New 
Orleans, I had to cover over 22,000 miles by rail. 
The excellence of the arrangements made is 
proved by the fact that no engagement was missed 
and only one had to be postponed. 

Before delivery I had written out only three of 
the ten addresses given in this volume. The other 
seven, starting from a few notes, grew as we went 
along. They have been reproduced from these 
notes and from shorthand reports of some of 
them, with the help of my daughter who accom- 
panied me as my secretary. Some further re- 



INTRODUCTION ix 

marks seem necessary. In speaking in Amer- 
ica I used in part the materials of addresses given 
in my own country since the war broke out. Again, 
the subjects of the addresses being closely related, 
they contain not a few repetitions of the same 
thoughts expressed sometimes in the same terms. 
In this volume I have left these repetitions stand- 
ing just as they were spoken. Again, it must be 
kept in mind that my mission began with the close 
of America's first year at war, at a time when in 
result of the last German offensive in France the 
fortunes of the Allies — in spite of British successes 
in Asia and Africa — appeared at as low an ebb as 
they had reached at any point, and when — though 
the American Navy and Army Medical Corps had 
been at work with the British for several months 
— only the first considerable detachments of Amer- 
ican troops had arrived in Europe. On those 
dark days there followed nearly three months dur- 
ing which our anxiety was but gradually relieved, 
first by the fortunate union of the Allied Armies 
under a single supreme command, then by the 
check to the German advance in Picardy and 
Flanders, and — most potentially — ^by the increased 
speed of the despatch of American soldiers to 
France in far greater numbers than either our 



X INTRODUCTION 

enemies or ourselves had deemed possible. Since 
these fruitful months of anxious strain, events, 
both in the East and In the West, have moved very 
rapidly in favour of the Allies. That their suf- 
ferings and sacrifices shall not be In vain is now 
becoming as clear to our sight as It has always 
been sure to our faith. By the time these addresses 
are published much of their appeal will seem be- 
lated. Still, they may stand as a record, why we 
Allies went to war, what were the sources of our 
courage under our unparalleled sufferings and 
despite our sense of our unfitness — what was the 
faith which sustained us and the grounds on which 
we pled before God, to our own and each other's 
hearts, the justice of our Cause. 

To His Grace the Chancellor, and to my col- 
leagues, of this University my warmest thanks are 
here given, for their cordial acquiescence in my 
mission to America, and their generous discharge 
of such additional duties as fell to them through 
my absence. 

GEORGE ADAM SMITH. 
University of Aberdeen, Scotland. 



CONTENTS 



Introduction 

CHAPTER 

I The Moral Aims of the Allies , 
II Britain's Part in the War 

III The British Hope and Its Grounds 

IV The Witness of France 
V Peace — False and True 

VI The Universities and the War . 
VII Some Religious Effects of the War 

VIII Faith and Service 

IX The Cloud of Witnesses . 
X Courage and Its Three Sources 
Epilogue — ^America at War . 



PAGE 

vii 

IS 

43 

73 

93 
US 

135 
155 
179 
195 
209 
223 



zi 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 



OUR 
COMMON CONSCIENCE 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 

Americans, kinsmen of my people at the first, 
for over a century our nearest friends, but to-day 
our Allies — at last our Allies — in the most sacred 
cause to which nations were ever called ! To the 
ties of blood which have bound us all along in 
spite of our disruptions there is now added the 
closer brotherhood of a common conscience, a 
common duty to the world, and a common sacrifice. 
The grave sense of responsibility with which I 
have come upon this mission I have been encour- 
aged to bear by the generosity of those who moved 
me to undertake it. I am here upon the invita- 
tion, conveyed through your honoured Ambas- 
sador in London, of your National Committee on 

IS 



16 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the Churches and the Moral Aims of the War, 
working in conjunction with your Government's 
Department of Public Information ; but also under 
the "sanction and cordial approval" of the British 
Foreign Office, and with a commendatory letter 
from my own Church, the United Free Church of 
Scotland, to the Churches and Christians of the 
United States. Highly as I value these supports 
from Church and State in my own country, 1 take 
my stand before you most firmly and most grate- 
fully upon the call of your own National Com- 
mittee — upon the fact that I speak as an invited 
guest, entrusted and commissioned by a number 
of your representative citizens and officials. 

My commission is twofold: to relate as far as 
I can the efforts of Great Britain on the many 
fronts of the war during now nearly four years, 
and to expound from the British point of view the 
moral aims common to the Allies in their warfare 
— ^those aims which on our side of the Atlantic 
have been clearly defined by Mr. Asquith and 
Mr. Balfour, Viscount Grey and Mr. Lloyd 
George, but nowhere with greater lucidity and 
impressiveness than by your own President. 

It Is safe to say that without those moral aims 
neither your people nor my people would have 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 17 

been at war to-day. Those alms alone are the 
secret of the practical unanimity with which each 
of the Allied Nations has rallied to the call of Its 
Government, and of the security of the agreement 
which binds them all, diverse and scattered as are 
their civilisations and national interests, in so un- 
shaken a resolution to fight and to suffer shoulder 
to shoulder till their sacred cause is carried 
through to victory. No greed for the territory 
of others, no lust of dominion, no passion for 
glory has drawn or could have drawn so many 
peoples into war or could maintain them in so 
costly but so firm an alliance. In the most con- 
crete form in which you may define the purposes 
for which we fight, these are altruistic: the re- 
demption of certain small nations from the servi- 
tude and slaughter to which they have been sub- 
jected, and for that end the overthrow of the 
powers which treacherously invaded their lands, 
ruthlessly devastated these and have deported, 
tortured and otherwise abused the peoples them- 
selves in defiance of every law human and Divine. 
But behind those concrete objectives, too well 
known that we should pause to name them, are 
the wider alms of which they are but details, alms 
on the scale of humanity Itself and not to be stated 



18 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

in narrower terms than justice, freedom, and 
peace for the whole world. For it is nothing less 
than those supreme interests of mankind as a 
whole which have been assaulted by Germany, 
which are denied by her avowed philosophy that 
might is right, which are still menaced by her 
stated aims and whole policy, and which have been 
insulted and wounded at every stage of her war- 
fare by the most atrocious cruelties the world has 
ever seen. Hating war, we Allies are at war for no 
other purpose than to end for ever such forms of 
war as Germany has forced upon the world, and 
to restore those foundations of Christian civilisa- 
tion which have been shaken and rent by the per- 
fidy and cruelty of the people that boasted itself 
to be civilisation's supreme representative. To 
borrow the phrase of a British statesman during 
the struggle against the last tyrant who threatened 
the freedom and peace of the world : "We are out, 
not to collect trophies but to restore the world 
to peaceful habits." 

Of all the Allies, France with her gifts of in- 
tuition and her closer experience of Germany Is 
perhaps the most Impressive witness to the justice 
of our cause and the moral aims of our warfare. 
I reserve her testimony for another address. In 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 19 

this, I wish to show how the conscience of my 
people has interpreted those aims, how that con- 
science has been articulated, as the war has gone 
on, by the words and the deeds of our foes, and 
how we have felt that it has been vindicated by 
your armed adhesion to our Alliance. 



The world knows why we British, all reluctant 
and unready as we were, were forced into this 
war. Germany broke her word, and we could 
not break ours. Twice over, by solemn treaties, 
Germany, Great Britain, and other European 
Powers had sworn to observe the neutrality of 
Belgium and to defend its integrity. By a later 
engagement at the Hague, which you of America 
shared, the civilised nations bound themselves to 
respect in war the inviolateness of the territories 
of neutral peoples. In August, 19 14, Germany 
invaded Belgium against the will of the Belgian 
people, thus breaking her oath and by the mouth 
of her own Chancellor owning her crime but 
pleading "necessity" as her excuse. Her further 
defence, that France had invaded Belgium first, 
was an afterthought and has been proved to be a 



«0 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

lie. For her own reputation before posterity she 
had better have been contented with Bethmann- 
Hollweg's unabashed confession that when she 
forced Belgium she was a criminal and an outlaw. 
It was this crime, this breach of faith by Ger- 
many, which united the British people behind 
their Government as nothing else could have done. 
Germany's suddenness, the suddenness with which 
all crimes break from their guilty preparations, 
left us but a few days in which to make up our 
minds with regard to our duty. I should rather 
say that this was a matter only of hours. I well 
remember that hot August night and day In which 
we restlessly waited for the decision of our lead- 
ers, and the sigh, or rather the roar, of relief that 
went up from all the borders of the United King- 
dom when it was learned that our Government 
had not flinched from its duty, that we meant to 
keep our word to Belgium and Europe, and that — 
knowing as we did that Germany had been pre- 
paring for such a war for forty years and more, 
and that we were unprepared, at least by land, 
adequately to meet the colossal struggle which she 
was forcing on the world — we would nevertheless 
fight her for justice and in vindication of the good 
faith between nations on which alone the freedom 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 21 

and the peace of the world depend. Within 
twenty-four hours that immediate, clear conscience 
of our people at home was echoed from every one 
of the free Commonwealths and the dependencies 
which form the British Empire round the world. 
There has been nothing like it in British history, 
nor I think in the history of any other nation. We 
were insufficiently equipped for a great war, we 
had been accepting the foreign criticism which 
called us lazy, luxurious and decadent, there was 
great social unrest among our people and we had 
just been on the verge of civil war. Yet in a few 
hours our nation at home became united as never 
before, and we were immediately joined by our 
fellow-citizens across the seas — some of them on 
the opposite side of the world from the dangers 
that menaced our own coasts, and some of them, 
the South-African Dutch, our enemies less than 
fifteen years before — and by the native states in 
Egypt and India of which we were the controlling 
power. Such a result could not have been effected 
by anything else than a just, a transparently and 
urgently just, cause. Thus from the beginning 
we have had proof of the moral aims of our 
warfare. 

Such was our original conscience, and my first 



22 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

message from my people to you Americans is this. 
So far from that conscience having been weakened 
by all which has happened since, it is to-day if 
possible even stronger and certainly far more ar- 
ticulate than it was at the beginning. War is a 
great disillusioner; there is none greater. War 
searches the hearts and tries the motives of na- 
tions as well as of individuals as nothing else can. 
War casts down every lofty imagination, it dis- 
covers every pretence, it bleeds pride pale, stifles 
in its awful waste all glamour and romance, and 
strips the wings off Victory herself, which in so 
terrible a struggle as this seems to stagger rather 
than to fly towards her goal. But I am here to 
tell you that in spite of four years of such war, 
in spite of all the disappointments and disasters 
it has brought us, in spite of all the suffering and 
sacrifice, our faith in the justice of our cause, our 
sense of our duty to fight for it, our determina- 
tion to see it through to victory stand unshaken 
and unshakable. All along we have only had 
one doubt and that is about ourselves. The more 
the sacredness of the cause committed to us has 
grown upon our minds, the more we have been 
tempted to doubt our own worthiness to be its 
instrument, and the strength of that doubt is an- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 23 

other proof of the quality of the Interests which 
have drawn it forth. It is the shadow of the 
great light which has never forsaken us, of the 
truth and purity of the ideals for which we fight. 

The materials of our convictions have been 
supplied by our enemies, and no more by their 
crimes than by their blunders, for those blunders 
have largely been the obvious, irrepressible 
errors of the criminal mind. Let me deal with 
these two subjects in turn. 

To the crimes of Germany in starting and car- 
rying on this war I shall call none but German 
witnesses. We need not dredge the English dic- 
tionary for epithets adequate to express those 
crimes when in the German language itself and 
from German mouths and pens, speaking or writ- 
ing from a close intimacy with the designs and 
methods of their Government, we have so full and 
so unsparing an indictment. 

I have already spoken of the German Chancel- 
lor's own confession. Let me remind you of an- 
other which before the war was five months old, 
was shouted on your own doorstep by a German 
journalist. In the "New York Times" of 6th 
December, 19 14, Max Harden exhorted the Ger- 
man Americans to "cease the pitiful attempts to 



24 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

excuse Germany's action. Not as weak-willed 
blunderers have we undertaken this war. We 
wanted it because we had to will It and could will 
it. . . . It strikes the hour of Germany's rising 
power." There you have It — what other Ger- 
mans call and boast of as the "unbounded will," 
superior to the moral law and reckless of hu- 
manity. 

The next German witness Is Prince Lichnow- 
sky, the Imperial Ambassador to London. The 
Memorandum which this Prussian noble, friend 
of the Kaiser and trusted agent of the German 
Government, has been forced by his conscience to 
write, is a complete vindication of Sir Edward 
Grey's honesty and strenuous efforts to preserve 
the peace of Europe. Prince Lichnowsky says: 
"My London mission was wrecked not by the per- 
fidy of the British but by the perfidy of our 
policy."* "We encouraged Count Berchtold to 
attack Serbia ... we rejected the British pro- 

^ This German admission is a complete answer to the 
statement of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald: "We shall find 
that the only reason from beginning to end in it is that 
our Foreign Office is anti-German and that the Ad- 
miralty was anxious to seize any opportunity of using the 
Navy in battle-practice." 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 25 

posals of mediation ... we deliberately de- 
stroyed the possibility of a peaceful settlement. 
... In view of these indisputable facts, it is not 
surprising that the whole civilised world outside 
Germany attributed to us the sole guilt for the 
world-war." And then this man of the world, 
this diplomat, this member of a class not given 
to quoting Scripture, has to go to Scripture to find 
terms adequate to his country's crime ; and there, 
from all the Divine sentences at his disposal, he 
chooses the heaviest of all, those awful words in 
which the Judge of the World defines the one un- 
pardonable sin. "I had to support in London a 
policy which I knew to be fallacious. I was paid 
out for it, for it was a sin against the Holy 
Ghost." 

Another damning witness against Germany is 
inscribed on her own statute-book. It betrays one 
of the basest of the many base forms in which 
her Government prepared for war by intriguing 
against the unity and order of other peoples with 
whom she was still at peace. In the German 
Imperial and State Citizen Law of 22 July, 19 13 
— one year and a week before war broke out — 
Section 25 deals with the case of a German emi- 
grating to another country, and provides that 



26 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

"citizenship [i.e. German citizenship] is not lost 
by one who before acquiring foreign citizenship 
has secured on appHcation the written consent of 
the competent authorities of his Home State to 
retain his [German] citizenship." What is this 
but to corrupt the decencies of civilisation and to 
sap the good faith between nations on which the 
peace of the world depends I We know that there 
are thousands and tens of thousands of Germans, 
settled in your country and in mine, who are too 
honest to take advantage of a treacherous law like 
that; who in this war have proved as loyal as 
native Britons or Americans to the interests of 
their adopted countries. But the law is the inven- 
tion of the German Government, and can have 
had no other purpose than to plant in countries, 
with which Germany was then at peace, a multi- 
tude of persons professing allegiance to those 
realms but secretly living and acting in allegiance 
to Germany. Allegiance is one and indivisible. 
No man can serve two masters, no citizen two 
laws. The same man can no more serve that flag 
of yours and the Kaiser at the same time than he 
can serve God and Mammon. 

I need not remind you of the loud boasts with 
which Germany entered upon this war — ^boasts of 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES %1 

the superiority of her civilisation, of her right to 
impose its discipline on other peoples, and of her 
purpose to annex such territories as would give 
her ports on the English Channel and I know not 
what else. Nor need I recall how at other times 
— particularly when things were going against 
her — Germany has pretended to repudiate all 
plans of aggression and conquest, or how the 
Reichstag by a majority declared against annexa- 
tion, or of the many German promises to the Bol- 
shevik authorities in Russia. Of the worth of 
these last professions let her final treatment of the 
Russians, in cool defiance of her treaty with them, 
and her whole conduct in Belgium be the measure. 
Take the last and most conceding thing she has 
said about Belgium, Chancellor von Hertling's 
assertion that his Government only holds Bel- 
gium as a "pawn" against the negotiations for 
peace. What criminal impudence! As if a 
burglar who had broken into a house and re- 
moved from it all the valuables were to say that 
he only proposed to hold the goods till the police 
came to terms with him! There is a less stupid 
confession in the "Testament" of the late General 
von Bissing, Military Governor of Belgium, 
friend of the Kaiser and familiar with the plans 



28 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

of the military party in Prussia. He has left 
on record the declaration that Germany must 
never give up a square yard of Belgian territory. 
Why? For four reasons. She needs a bastion 
or bulwark to the Rhenish provinces of Prussia. 
She needs all Belgium's famous mineral resources. 
She means to exploit the as famous industry and 
skill of the Belgian workmen. And fourthly, and 
here the matter touches yourselves, she needs Ant- 
werp and the Belgian coast as the best jumping-off 
place for South America. Von Bissing says noth- 
ing of Britain; that evidently is to be a mere bite 
on the way, an hors-d' ceuvre to the banquet which 
Germany sees spread across the Atlantic. Noth- 
ing is said of North America, because even Ger- 
man arrogance pauses at an invasion of your 
States. For you another fate was intended. We 
British have wondered why the German Govern- 
ment so wantonly provoked you to war. Had 
they not already enough of enemies? Why did 
they go out of their way to strain your patience, 
to insult and tempt you to fight, to challenge 
your sense of justice and humanity by countless 
outrages, to meddle in Mexico, and so forth? 
It all looks so needless and so wanton ; but it was 
done with a purpose. Remember, Germany has 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES S9 

never failed in her assurance of winning the war. 
Well, in that case, who was to pay her the indem- 
nities on which she has set her heart, who but your- 
selves? She has sucked Belgium like an orange. 
Italy was already poor. She believed that she 
had impoverished France (which is not true) , an^ 
she even thought that we British were getting to 
the bottom of our deep breeches' pockets. But 
there was your wealth and the inexhaustible re- 
sources of your Continent. So, whether reck- 
lessly or deliberately, she counted on you to pay 
her the indemnities she confidently intended to 
extort. Indemnities forsooth ! The costs of such 
a war as this are not to be indemnities paid by one 
nation to another. They are the judgments of 
God, and while no nation may escape them they 
are certain to fall most heavily on the criminal that 
provoked, and alone provoked, this wanton war. 
There are many other German witnesses to the 
same verdict. We should all read the testimony 
of at least one of them, Herr Stuermer, the Con- 
stantinople correspondent of a German paper, 
whose experience of the Eastern policy of his 
Government led him to resign not only his situa- 
tion but his German citizenship. He has written 
a book "My Four Years in Constantinople," in 



30 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

which he exposes the crimes of the German Al- 
liance with Turkey, and in particular clearly 
proves the responsibility of Berlin for the mas- 
sacres and deportations of the Armenians. Mr. 
Morgenthau, your Ambassador to the Porte, has 
told me that Herr Stuermer is a reliable man. 

But as I have said, the blunders of Germany 
have been as damning as her crimes, for they have 
been the blunders of the criminal mind. One can 
never be reckless of the moral law without being 
reckless of reason and prudence as well. 

The greatest, the fundamental blunder of Ger- 
many, was in beginning the war at all. Had she 
been willing to keep the peace for fifteen or twenty 
years longer she might have obtained everything 
which she hoped to win in a war of a few months. 
Bethmann-Hollweg confessed this (fortunately for 
our enlightenment this Chancellor had a habit of 
confessing) when at last he sought to defend his 
people from the charge of willing the war. 
"Why," said he, "we could have got, and were 
actually getting, by peaceful means all we now 
fight for." That is very true. The world wel- 
comed the gifts of German genius when offered 
by clean and peaceful hands. The seas were free 
to the growing commerce of Germany. Under 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 31 

British guarding they have been free for a century 
to all but pirates. Our ports were as open to 
German ships as to our own. To their hurt other 
states were lenient to the intrusion of German 
merchants and factories, and, in the case of some, 
to German exploitation of their natural resources. 
By these opportunities and by her ruthless effi- 
ciency and powers of organisation, Germany was 
fast rising towards the economic domination of 
Europe. Again, she had received as colonies, 
territories five times as vast as her Empire in 
Europe, and this by the goodwill of other powers 
and without striking a blow for them. Again, 
one of the main highways to Asia was more open 
to her than to any other Western people ; her in- 
fluence with Turkey was supreme, and the rest 
of Europe left to her the direction of the new 
railway across Asia Minor^ and provided her with 
funds to carry it out. But her governors were 
blinded by the criminal passion for war, and for 
two generations her people had been educated in 
the doctrine that a strong state grows stronger by 

^ Which her engineers laid down, not upon lines cal- 
culated to develop the resources of the country or 
otherwise assist the population, but on lines dictated 
by purely military considerations. 



32 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

war, so war they chose when their interest was 
plainly to keep the peace for at least a time. The 
same German voice which in 19 14 boasted that 
Germany needed no excuse save her will to war 
now cries: "The war is a mistake and a cruel 
misfortune."^ 

Another line on which the blunders of this 
criminal power have been obvious runs through 
its estimates of other peoples. The world gave 
Germany some credit, and she took more to her- 
self, for psychological exper'tness. She would 
claim to understand us better than we understood 
ourselves, and she certainly took pains to do so. 
For years she abused the hospitality of other 
peoples by scattering through them battalions of 
clever, amiable, patient spies. And yet with all 
her gifts and all her instruments she never pene- 
trated the soul of one of us. She believed that 
Belgium would yield to her insolent demand for 
free passage towards France; and, for the first 
desperate weeks of the war, the small Belgian 
army withstood her hordes with a valour that 
will shine as imperishable through history as that 
of the Greeks at Thermopylae. She satisfied her- 
self that France, distraught by political and re- 
^ Max Harden in February, 19 16. 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 33 

liglous quarrels, was also dissolute and decadent; 
and for four years France has fought her with a 
courage and a skill at least equal to her own. 
Decadent! Which people shall posterity judge 
to have been the decadents — those who planned 
and who gloated over the sinking of the "Lusi- 
tania," or the French, who never once allowed 
such prolonged "frightfulness" as makes even the 
sinking of the "Lusltania" seem tame to abate 
their courage or their steadfast will to overcome. 
Again, the German Government believed that 
Great Britain could not and would not fight, and it 
sought to bribe us by an insulting proposal that 
we should betray our friends of France, that we 
should sacrifice our honour for a safe neutrality. 
Germany measured other peoples by herself and 
judged them, in the weakness she blindly imputed 
to them, to be as faithless as she was In her scorn- 
ful might. When we amazed her by daring to 
fight, she called our armies "contemptible" and 
boasted that she could beat them in a few weeks. 
She knows better now. She has said similar things 
about your army and will soon know better about 
them too. These fatal blunders have all been due 
to an excess of pride. They recall the judgment 
once passed on a great but arrogant writer; "A 



34s OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

quality of self-sufficiency so inordinate as scarce 
to be distinguished now and then from an im- 
mense stupidity." 

From the first the eyes of Germany have been 
too inflamed by her passion for war to see the 
situation steadily or to see it whole. The "mailed 
fist" has been too heavily mailed for its fingers to 
feel the pulse either of Europe or of America. 

These, then, are some of the materials with 
which our enemies have strengthened and articu- 
lated the conscience of my people. The first duty 
which called us, the deliverance of Belgium, is 
still our duty, and by all the cruelties and extor- 
tions inflicted on that land has become more 
urgent than ever. In the whole world outside 
Germany and her confederates there is not a man, 
however pacifist be his temper, who does not agree 
that the first indispensable condition on which 
Germany may have peace is that she shall sur- 
render Belgium and make every possible repara- 
tion for the cruelties she has inflicted upon its 
people. But Belgium is only a detail of the Ger- 
man crime.The breach of faith through which that 
country was invaded but tore the mask off a face, 
and off a spirit behind the face, which every month 
we have had to confront them has more fully dis- 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 35 

covered to us to be implacably hostile to the moral- 
ity on which the peace and the progress of man- 
kind depend, and to be resolute by force of arms 
to impose on the world in the place of that moral- 
ity a philosophy and discipline fatal to freedom 
and to justice. To such a spirit what is the use 
of talking peace? Whenever the rulers of Ger- 
many have done so, this has been without any 
penitence for that first crime which, in assaulting 
Belgium, assaulted the most sacred interests of 
humanity as a whole. We know what they intend 
by the ambiguous terms they have offered; for 
franker Germans, soldiers and civilians alike, have 
told their people that the peace they seek is to be 
a fuller preparation for again assailing civilisation 
with the same aims and the same temper as they 
have shown from first to last in this war. How 
can you parley with such a foe till he is beaten and 
knows he is beaten? He has boasted that the 
only right he knows is his might; how can he be 
convinced he is wrong till he learns that that might 
is useless? He has openly warned us that "fright- 
fulness" is the means by which he proposes to 
subdue the world; how can one meet such a power 
except in arms? These are the questions to which 
our experience of Germany has supplied us with 



36 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

but one answer, ready as we were to find at first 
more peaceful solutions. Your own President 
has stated the issue exactly: "The German power, 
a thing without conscience, honour, or capacity for 
covenanted peace, must be crushed. Our present 
and immediate task is to win the war, and nothing 
shall turn us aside till it is accomplished." That 
is what we have felt throughout the whole four 
years of war. That is where our conscience and 
our will still stand to-day. 



And now you Americans have come in to con- 
firm that conscience and to reinforce that will. 
That we should have grudged your delay was 
natural; had it been possible for you to come 
sooner this, of course, would have meant a swifter 
ending to the war. Our regrets, and your own 
regrets, that when the Germans launched their 
recent offensive your soldiers were not already in 
France in millions instead of in hundreds of thou- 
sands were also natural. But such considerations 
have been overborne by the moral results of your 
postponed arrival, and for these we are grateful 
even more than for the inexhaustibleness of the 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 37 

material resources which you have brought to the 
Alliance. The pregnant patience of your Presi- 
dent has had at least these two effects. It has 
brought you in a united nation — on that I need 
not linger, for you know it better than we do. 
But it has also had a moral effect on ourselves and 
on the French which you cannot feel as we feel it. 
Remember what I said of the suddenness of our 
call to war. We had to make up our mind and 
interpret our conscience not in a few days but 
actually in a few hours. You took two and a half 
years. For over two and a half years you 
patiently bore with German intrigue and treach- 
ery. You treated Germany by every means short 
of war, and you proved the futility of such a treat- 
ment. You explored and exposed the German 
mind to its depths. And after all that patient 
experiment and experience, you came deliberately 
to the same conclusion as we had been rushed to 
— necessarily rushed — at the first, and you took 
your place in arms by our side. That was the 
most powerful moral vindication which one people 
ever brought to another in the whole range of 
history. I am here in the name of my people to 
thank you for it. 
But we feel more than that. We know you to 



38 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

be a people that have never put your hearts and 
hands to any just cause but you have seen it 
through to victory. Through years of sore and 
fluctuating war you struggled for and you won 
your Independence — won it against us, and yet 
not against the whole of us, for half of us were 
with you all the time; and besides, you must 
remember that we were then somewhat handi- 
capped by having a German King. Again, through 
years of sore and fluctuating war you fought for 
and firmly established your Union. Now you are 
out once more to fight for Freedom and for Union, 
but this time for both of them on an infinitely 
larger scale. Then your aim was your own 
liberty, now it is that of every nation menaced 
by the most formidable and obstinate conspiracy 
against the natural liberties of mankind. Then 
you fought for and achieved the United States of 
America ; now your ultimate aim is the establish- 
ment of the United States of the World — such a 
League of Nations, based upon conscience and 
justice, as shall for ever render impossible the 
recurrence anywhere, or by any Power, of the 
criminal assault which Germany has delivered 
upon civilisation. 



THE MORAL AIMS OF THE ALLIES 39 

3 

I come to you from a people that through four 
years have drunk the cup of the agony of war to 
the dregs. Week by week these years we have 
walked ever deeper and deeper into that Valley 
of the Shadow of Death which you are now enter- 
ing. There is hardly a home known to me — and 
here I speak not only of my private acquaintance, 
but also of those opened to me as Principal of a 
University over 250 of whose sons have already 
fallen — I say there is hardly a home known to me 
that has not lost one, or in some cases two, and 
even three sons. My country of Scotland is full of 
mourning, but it is mourning in courage and with 
faith. I am come to tell you that the countless 
sacrifices we have endured have but further hal- 
lowed the sacred cause entrusted to us. As you 
join us, you find us a people war-weary and war- 
sick, one may say without exaggeration a people 
bleeding at every pore, but be sure that in spite of 
all we have suffered and spent, our conscience is 
undistracted, our faith in the justice of our cause 
is undiminished, and that, whatever further sacri- 
fices await us, we are unshakably determined with 
you and our other Allies to see that cause through 
to its inevitable victory. 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 



II 

BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, friends, 
allies, and comrades in the great war! — Before 
proceeding with my address, I must thank you for 
the heartiness with which you have just sung the 
National Anthem of my people along with your 
own. These are the first times I have heard 
American audiences do so. I want to tell you 
what good grounds you have for joining in that 
prayer for our King and Queen. They have both 
of them been a great moral asset to us during this 
war; by their simple lives, their courage, and their 
hard and cheerful work they have proved true 
leaders of our democracy, setting us an example 
of service in loyalty to the Word of Christ, "Let 
him that is chief amoiig you be as he that doth 
serve." 

The subject on which I have been asked to 
speak is no less than the part that my country has 
taken, for now nearly four years, in the present 

43 



44 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

awful war. That is a large subject, and In the 
time at our disposal can be treated only in outline, 
with the addition, perhaps, of a few particular 
sections of its contents. I am not now to detail 
why we are in this war. You who have followed 
us into it, with the same conscience, hardly need 
to be told that; and I have dealt with the question 
in other addresses. It is enough to say that, sud- 
denly as the call came to us, it came in a very clear 
and signal form. As I have described elsewhere, 
we were in no little confusion and darkness. War 
always darkens the heavens, and this war espe- 
cially raised heavy clouds between the faith of 
many and the sovereignty of God. We were 
humbled by the disruption of Christendom. We 
were dismayed by the apparent failure of the spir- 
itual forces which make for the peace of the world, 
by the rupture of those mutual ministries of man- 
kind on which the progress of the race depends. 
We were haunted by the sense of our unprepared- 
ness for a great war, and we knew how equipped 
and ready to the moment were our powerful ad- 
versaries. There was the deeper sense of our 
national sins; before such a crisis a people must 
feel their guilty weakness. But through it all our 
duty was clear. Our enemies left us in no doubt 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 45 

of that. And the conscience of our people at 
home and across the seas rose to It like the con- 
science of one man. We have had now nearly 
four years of war, and there is nothing during 
all that time that our foes have done or said, and 
nothing that we have bitterly learned or suffered, 
but has strengthened and articulated those first 
instincts of our duty and confirmed our faith in 
the justice of our cause and our resolution to fight 
for it till the end. In that original conscience we 
have waited for you and are waiting,* and you will 
find us determined, at whatever further cost to 
ourselves, not to yield nor flinch till you and we 
with all our Allies have won a righteous and a 
stable peace. 



Now to my present subject! I have first of 
all to emphasise what is undoubtedly the greatest 
fact of our warfare, and most significant of the 
moral forces which have moved us — what poster- 
ity will regard as the most wonderful event in the 
history of modern Europe. It is this. When we 

^ This was spoken at the beginning of my mission, 
before the American troops had reached France in any 
great number. 



46 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

entered the war our army did not number more 
than a few hundreds of thousands, of which about 
160,000 were all that we were ready to send to 
the help of Belgium and France. Yet in about 
two years that army, without conscription or com- 
pulsion, had grown to about 5,000,000. Every 
man was a volunteer. That, sir, is a fact un- 
precedented in the history of Europe, and it could 
not have happened except under the influence of a 
great, a profound moral inspiration. That is one 
of the many manifestations of the justice of our 
cause, one of the many proofs that, in forcing war 
upon the world, Germany had challenged the 
moral instincts of the race. 

Some of us, sir, were sorry at the time that 
conscription had at last to be enforced. We had 
hoped to see the whole available manhood of the 
nation sweep freely into the ranks of so sacred a 
cause. But that could not be, and at last we had 
to adopt conscription for the same reasons as you 
have more immediately done. Only I must add 
to what I have said about the rise of that mag- 
nificent volunteer army, the largest ever raised in 
history, that the spirit which has distinguished 
their successors who have come in under conscrip- 
tion has been not less gallant, not less willing, and 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 47 

not less resolute than that of the volunteers them- 
selves. 

Sir, it is sometimes said by pacifists on our side 
of the water — and I saw an echo of this from the 
mouth of one of your pacifists quoted in a news- 
paper the other day — ^that this war, and the re- 
cruiting to which it has compelled us, is the con- 
spiracy of old and elderly men, the effort of my 
own generation to push forward, with safety to 
themselves, the youth of their nation to bear the 
brunt and the agony. It has been asserted that the 
war has been due to the greed and the blunders 
of aged diplomats, and that its spirit has been 
fostered mainly by elderly bellicose parsons like 
myself — a set of selfish Abrahams driving their 
Isaacs to the altar. I have seen these very terms 
iised in a certain journal more than once. Sir, 
that is a sheer falsehood. I can say so from 
my own experience as a father and as Principal of 
a large University. Our young men, whether 
they went to war under our voluntary system of 
enlistment for the first two years or later under 
conscription, went deliberately and with clear 
consciences, not ignorant of the solemn possibili- 
ties that lay before each of them, but convinced 
also of the moral issues that were at stake, 



48 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

and resolved at whatever sacrifice to do their duty 
in carrying those issues to victory. 

If there were any regrets, misgivings and with- 
holdings, these were not in the hearts of our sons 
but in those of the parents who saw them go forth. 
Every war is a young men's war, but this has been 
the war not only of the physical strength of our 
youth, but of their conscience, their moral resolu- 
tion, and their faith. 

Nor has this temper been confined to our youth, 
but has been shared by the older men as well. 
Before the age of service was raised I suppose 
that more members of my sex than ever before 
in history perjured themselves with regard to their 
years. You have heard, I daresay, of the French 
lady who celebrated the seventeenth anniversary 
of her thirty-fifth birthday. Well, there were 
many of my countrymen who made a similar pre- 
tence, and who said they were thirty-five when 
they were forty-two and fifty-two and even up to 
sixty. And the rest of us could only regret that 
we were not thirty years younger. In fact, the 
whole of our population, with very few and negli- 
gible exceptions, were stirred by the call to war, 
and united in the determination to prosecute it as 
the British people never have been stirred or 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 49 

united in their history before. And that was just 
because of the common conscience which possessed 
us. Nothing else could have eJFfected so universal 
a result. 

Let me now give you a few sections through 
this national movement. In Scotland we have a 
population under 5,000,000. I am informed that 
out of that population over 900,000 have already 
been enlisted. The nearest part of Scotland to 
America is, I think, the island of Lewis in the 
Outer Hebrides. The population of that island 
all told is some 30,000 — men, women, and chil- 
dren. How many men do you think passed into 
the ranks of His Majesty's forces, either into the 
Navy or into the Army, within the first two years 
of the war, out of that population of 30,000? — 
6000 men. 

Again take these facts. When the war was 
about two years old a roll was drawn up of the 
sons of ministers of the Church of Scotland of 
military age, and it was found that no less than 
ninety per cent, of them had enlisted or held com- 
missions in the forces. The ten per cent, who are 
over may well be accounted for by physical and 
other disabilities. Approximately the same figures 
hold good of ministers' sons in my own Church, 



50 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the United Free Church of Scotland, and the other 
Scottish Churches. That is to say, practically all 
the "sons of the manse" in Scotland, who were 
available, volunteered for service with the colours. 
There are no statistics for our other Christian 
homes, but If there were they would show similar 
results. 

Or take the Universities of Great Britain.^ I 
have the figures for most of them up to the spring 
of 19 17, and I find that the number of male 
students then left was in no case more than one- 
ihird of what it had been In the year before the 
war, that In most cases It was down to one-fourth, 
and that In Oxford and Cambridge, whose 
students on the whole are a little older than those 
of other Universities, some of the colleges had 
only one-tenth of their former numbers. Of the 
four Universities of Scotland, taking them 'ac- 
cording to their seniority, St. Andrews has now 
about 800, graduates and students, on Its Roll 
of Service; Glasgow over 3200; Aberdeen over 
2600; and Edinburgh over 5100. Let me give 
you some details of my own University oi Aber- 
deen. The only men students we have left are 

^ See further Address VI, "The Universities and the 
War." 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 61 

either under military age or otherwise ineligible 
for service, or have returned from service 
wounded, or are completing their medical studies. 
Their numbers are about one-fourth of what they 
used to be. When conscription came in, and all 
our students above eighteen were called up in 
the middle of the spring term of last year, the 
local recruiting authorities agreed to allow them 
to remain at their studies till the close of the term, 
on condition that they would not then apply to the 
military tribunals for exemption. I called them 
together and put the question before them, and 
I need hardly say that they repudiated the idea that 
any of them would claim exemption. They went 
to the colours as eagerly as their purely volunteer 
predecessors in previous years. The register of 
our graduates, men and women, of all ages from 
twenty-one to eighty and ninety, numbers barely 
over 5000. Of these, no fewer than 1759 have 
gone on naval or military service, while a large 
number more whom we have not yet exactly 
counted are engaged in Government offices con- 
nected with the war, in munition-work, in research 
for the purposes of the war, or in indispensable 
medical or educational service. I know the reg- 
ister well, and can assure you that there are not 



52 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

many upon it of suitable age who are not engaged 
in war-work of some kind or other. And this is 
even true of many above military age. Among 
professional men our schoolmasters distinguished 
themselves from the first by their eagerness to 
serve, and I know several cases where their wives, 
being themselves certificated teachers, have taken 
up the duties of their husbands in order to let 
these off to the war. 

Take another section in illustration. The 
other day I asked the Colonel of the reserve bat- 
talion of a famous Highland regiment how many 
men his battalion had supplied since the beginning 
of the war to the two regular battalions of his 
regiment. He replied between 14,000 and 16,000 
men. A battalion, as you know, consists of from 
850 to 1000 men — ^that is to say, each of these 
battalions has had to be refilled from seven to 
eight times over. I believe the same to have been 
true of many other British regiments. 

Two years ago, when I was out on the front 
in the Somme valley, our motor-car was stopped in 
its place in the endless columns of regiments and 
ammunition trains marching up and down, and I 
got out upon a great muddy field sloping under the 
cold sky and swept by a bitter wind, where the 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 53 

fragments of a Manchester regiment, one of the 
New Army raised by Lord Kitchener, was rest- 
ing, after some days on the front line of our ad- 
vance. I found them mustered for the roll-call, 
I think one of the most pathetic scenes I have ever 
witnessed. The regiment had gone to the front 
some days before between 800 and 900 strong, 
and I now saw them mustered in a total strength 
of 256, on this field of mud where their only 
shelters were shallow pits hastily dug and roofed 
with waterproof sheets. When they broke up I 
spoke to a group of four of them. I said to one, 
"What were you before the war?" He said, "I 
was a ticket-collector, sir." "And what were 
you?" "I was a conductor." "And what were 
you ?" "I was a lawyer's clerk." I forget what 
the fourth said he was. But here were four ordi- 
nary civilians who had never expected to handle 
a gun in their lives, and yet they were out there 
doing their duty on the front of the war, and 
among its dangers and privations as cheery and 
as resolute as could be. That was the spirit which 
inspired our volunteer armies from first to last. 
Scenes like this could Le multiplied Indefinitely. 

On the whole, England and Scotland have sent 
to the war one man to every seven and a half of 



54 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the population; Wales one man In every ten and 
a fifth; Ireland one man in every twenty-six; and 
our kinsmen overseas one man in every fifteen.^ 
In all, Great Britain and her Dominions overseas 
have raised 7,500,000 of soldiers for this war. 

This huge and rapidly raised army has been 
sent not to the single front of the war on which 
so far your American eyes still rest,^ but to many 
fronts all round the world. 

First of all, there was the battle-line through 
France and Flanders. There, with the French 
and Belgian armies, British troops, on a line fre- 
quently over 100 miles in length, have repelled 
sometimes far larger and better equipped German 
armies. They assisted in turning them on the 
Marne and the Aisne, they kept them from getting 
to the Channel ports. At and around Ypres 
especially, against enormous odds, they held their 
untrenched lines, sometimes sacrificing themselves 
almost to the last man. And that long critical 
line they will continue to hold till your soldiers In 
their millions have joined them. 

^ These figures are brought down to July, 19 18, and 
have been supplied by the British Office in New York. 

2 This was spoken in April, but of course is no longer 
true. 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 5S 

Another part of the British Army, as you know, 
has helped to stay the disastrous Italian retreat 
as well as support the fresh Italian advance on 
the banks of the Piave. 

We have another large army, beside a French 
one, defending, on a long line above Salonika, 
Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from Ger- 
mans, Austrians, Bulgarians, and Turks. 

We have had another army garrisoning Egypt, 
repelling from its western borders the attacks of 
the Libyan Arabs tempted by German gold, de- 
fending the Suez Canal, and now advancing slowly 
but surely through Palestine. Whatever the end 
of that campaign may be. General Allenby's 
troops, English, Scottish, French, Australian, and 
Indian, have established themselves in an impreg- 
nable position upon the hill-country of Judea and 
have secured the coast well to the north of Jaffa.^ 
There is every prospect of the deliverance of Pal- 
estine from the Turks, who have no right to it, 
either natural or moral; but who for four cen- 
turies have wasted its fertility, neglected its com- 

^ By the beginning of October they have captured 
Damascus and dispersed the Turkish forces on both 
sides of the Jordan. 



56 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

mercial and industrial possibilities and oppressed 
its hard-working peasantry. 

Another smaller force at Aden holds back the 
Turks and their Arab vassals from interfering 
with our water-way to India down the Red Sea. 
And there is that great host both of combatant 
forces and many labour battalions, with its base 
in India, which has reached Mesopotamia by the 
Persian Gulf and has already, under the brilliant 
leadership of General Maude, taken Bagdad, as 
General AUenby has taken Jerusalem, and has vic- 
toriously advanced far beyond that up both the 
Tigris and the Euphrates. But our Mesopota- 
mian campaign has not been one of conquest only. 
Behind the combatant forces, the labour bat- 
talions, recruited in India, have been busily at 
work; and the country has been organised and is 
being irrigated and cultivated with the near pros- 
pect of the full restoration of its marvellous fer- 
tility. The Arabs, delivered from that Turkish 
neglect and oppression which has for so many 
centuries devastated the country, have been as- 
sured of our good will, and promised their inde- 
pendence and the secure practice both of their 
religion and the immense economic possibilities of 
their wonderful soil. 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 57 

We have another army garrisoning India, not 
so much for the purpose of controlling the popu- 
lations who throughout the war have exhibited a 
remarkable loyalty to the cause of the AUIes, but 
in order to repel Invasions by the half-savage 
tribes of the North-Western frontier, excited by 
German gold and equipped with German muni- 
tions. Let me give you here a Hindu testimony 
to the justice of our cause. Dr. Sarvadhlkarl, a 
Hindu gentleman of the Hindu religion and vice- 
Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, In ad- 
dressing Convocation in 191 5, spoke as follows: 
"Thanks to the strong arm which protects us in 
our seats of learning we are free to follow con- 
genial pursuits. There Is reason for abundant 
gratitude for the ability and means to continue our 
work. England and India have been long work- 
ing together in the fields of peace. They have 
now been called side by side in the common cause. 
It was Great Britain's singular triumph to en- 
circle the world with steel. To-day she has 
achieved a greater glory, and is able to summon 
and receive prompt and willing assistance in de- 
fence of the Empire from all parts of the globe. 
It is still more glorious to be able to encircle the 
world with a girdle of united prayer from all 



68 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

races and creeds In the cause of righteousness." 
Now we come to Africa. In Africa we have 
had several other armies at work since the begin- 
ning of the war till, as you know, Germany has 
lost all the vast colonies which she used to possess 
in that continent. What are the troops which 
have been fighting for us there? Only some of 
them have been British. The rest are South 
African Dutch, our foes less than eighteen years 
ago In the Boer War. We came to terms with 
them, bringing them into the Commonwealth of 
the British Empire. We promised them the same 
freedom which other parts of that Commonwealth 
have always enjoyed. And we kept our word. 
What was the result? The Boers, In spite of their 
close kinship to the Germans, have from the be- 
ginning of this war not only proved loyal to the 
British cause in South Africa, but have fought the 
Germans out of South-west and East Africa with 
a skill and determination equal to our own. We 
have had no more able generals on our side than 
our two former enemies, General Botha and Gen- 
eral Smuts. General Smuts is a member of the 
inner circle of our Government, and there Is none 
of our Councillors or Statesmen whom all of us, 
whether Irish or Scottish or English, trust more 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 59 

than we trust himself. Would these Dutch, so 
recently our enemies, have thus planned and 
fought had they not realised in our Empire some- 
thing essential to their freedom and prosperity, 
and had they not seen in the German power and 
form of culture something that menaced justice 
and freedom all the world over? 



I have left little time to speak of the work of 
the British Navy, but there Is no need for me to 
instruct an American audience on that side of my 
subject. Since coming to the United States I have 
had many proofs of how well you realise the in- 
dispensable service rendered by the Navy and 
the Naval Reserves of Great Britain to the cause 
of the Allies. With the assistance of the smaller 
navies of France and Italy they have not only 
driven the German High Fleet into the refuge of 
its ports, but have swept the oceans of the world 
of German commerce. They have defended the 
coasts of Great Britain from invasion by a foe not 
200 miles away. They have kept a ceaseless 
watch round three continents and, above all, ac- 
cording to my information, they have transported 



60 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

overseas 13,000,000 men, 2,000,000 horses and 
mules, 25,000,000 tons of explosives, 51,000,000 
tons of oil and fuel, and 130,000,000 tons of 
food and other stores. Now for more than a 
year, in close and cordial co-operation with your 
fleets, they have continued their colossal task and 
have held and are holding in check those piratical 
submarine forces on which Germany has staked 
her conquest of the world. 

Since the beginning of the war, the British 
Navy "has tripled its personnel and doubled its 
fighting armament." You must add that to what 
I have told you of the rise of the British Army. 

If you wish to read of what our mercantile and 
fishing marine have done, both for our home seas 
and in waters as far away as the Adriatic, in 
mine-sweeping, in scouting and patrolling, and in 
fighting enemy submarines, get Professor Mac- 
Neile Dixon's volume "The Fleets Behind the 
Fleet". There you will find the record of a vig- 
ilance, endurance, and courage worthy to be placed 
for its splendour beside the most heroic achieve- 
ments of our Navy in the past, and far exceeding 
them both in the variety of its details and the 
wide range of its operations. 

I know of what I speak, for I have both visited 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 61 

the Grand Fleet and In a common drifter have 
watched the operations of mine-sweeping and 
patrolling among the stormy seas of our Scottish 
coasts. The courage and resolution of men who 
before the war were peaceful fishermen and 
sailors Is equal to those which I have described of 
their brothers in the armies of Flanders and the 
Somme. As an illustration of the ceaseless vigi- 
lance with which the widest oceans are still 
patrolled, let me give you the following Instance. 
In coming over here on an Atlantic liner, we were 
suddenly stopped one morning at twilight by a 
shot fired across our bows. It was a British 
cruiser which, not content with interrogating us 
by signal, circled round us several times before 
letting us continue our voyage. The reason, we 
were told, was this. Our ship used to carry three 
masts but had left one behind in the port of our 
departure, and the cruiser had therefore failed to 
recognise her. We proceeded on our way with a 
fresh sense of security. That cruiser, the only 
ship we saw upon our voyage, coming out of no- 
where, was proof to us of the unseen eyes by which 
the vast waste of waters is ceaselessly watched. 

Let me add this. I have seldom been so thrilled 
in my life as by the sight of American and British 



62 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

fleets lying side by side in one of our Scottish 
firths. 



Those great forces, of course, have had to be 
fed, to be munitioned, and to be doctored. Speak- 
ing only of the Western front, the only front of 
which I have personal knowledge, I may say that 
I was in constant doubt at which to marvel most 
— ^the fighting-powers of our army or the wonder- 
ful organisation behind their lines by which they 
are fed and otherwise supported. Our troops 
there have the best of our beef and bacon, the 
finest of our wheat, and full supplies of sugar, 
coffee, tea, and other articles. From the great 
bakeries at the bases to the travelling kitchens of 
each unit at the front the system works with a 
rigorous efficiency. To effect this, we have long 
been rationing ourselves at home. I need not go 
into detail, but the following instances may in- 
terest you. Wheat had long been a stranger to 
our homes before I came away. In my part of 
the country each family's weekly supply of butcher 
meat had been cut down to half of what it used 
to be in normal times of peace. In the first week 
of March I took up to a friend in a good position 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 63 

in London a roast of beef of six pounds in weight, 
the first that had crossed his threshold since 
Christmas. The total material used in brewing 
beer in 19 14 was 1,500,000 tons; it has now been 
reduced to 500,000. The strength of beer has 
been largely reduced and during 19 17 no manufac- 
ture of spirits for human consumption has been 
permitted. No unmalted barley is now in the 
hands of brewers. One million acres were added 
in 19 1 7 to the cultivated area within Great Brit- 
ain, and 850,000 tons of cereals and 5,000,000 
tons of potatoes were produced in addition to the 
average of previous years. 

Take next our munitions. In June, 19 15, the 
Ministry of Munitions was formed, and since 
then our output has been increased twenty-eight 
times over. In 19 14 our steel output was 7,000,- 
000 tons, and the estimated output for 19 18 is 
12,000,000. The output of machine-guns has in- 
creased thirty-nine times; of light guns nineteen 
times; of heavy guns seventy times; and of very 
heavy guns two hundred and twenty. Towards 
the end of 19 17 about 2,000,000 men and 700,- 
000 women were engaged on munition work 
proper. Besides 90 National Arsenals our Gov- 
ernment now controls 5046 factories working day 



64 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

and night on munitions and supplies. There are 
parts of my country growing out of recognition; 
here and there whole cities of factories and dwell- 
ings for the workers have arisen since the war 
began. We are now expending ammunition each 
week at sixty-five times the rate of the expenditure 
during the first ten months of the war. 

I come now to the medical care of our armies. 
I have not the full figures but, as you know, the 
sanitary and preventive departments of this work 
have been so efficient that, in our Western armies 
at least, the suffering from disease Is but a frac- 
tion of what prevailed in previous wars. Armies 
used to be ravaged by typhoid and by other epi- 
demics; in our vast forces In the West the cases 
of these diseases have been comparatively few. 
The Army Medical Service and the British Red 
Cross have been splendidly organised. The trans- 
port of the wounded has been marvellously effi- 
cient and rapid. In London hospitals I have 
talked with men who have been comfortably 
bedded there before midnight of the same day on 
which they were wounded. In my own city of 
Aberdeen we have the most northerly General 
Hospital in the Kingdom, some five or six hundred 
miles distant from the Channel ports at which 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 65 

the hospital ships arrive from France. Well- 
equipped ambulance trains have sometimes de- 
posited In Aberdeen men within forty-eight hours 
of their having been wounded In France. 

The medical profession of our country has 
been mobilised for the war, and all its best ability 
and experience have been devoted to our troops. 
Let me give you one incident which illustrates 
this. In the early months of the war I was calling 
upon the mother of one of our students who had 
been among the first to fall. She was a widow 
with only one other son, and at first she was un- 
able to do anything but moan repeatedly, "Oh, 
why was It my laddie that was taken, oh, why was 
he taken!" After some time of this she suddenly 
turned round — she had been lying with her back 
to me — and with pride In her eyes she said: "But 
he had fower speeciallsts wi' him afore he died". 
Sir, the same surgical skill and devotion have been 
at the service of every wounded private In the 
British Army. The drain upon our medical re- 
sources has been exhausting. In 19 17 alone the 
casualties among officers of the Royal Army Med- 
ical Corps have been very numerous. But al- 
ready you have sent additions to their depleted 
ranks, and we are grateful for the American doc- 



66 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

tors and surgeons who are at work in our military 
hospitals at home or attached to many of our 
units in the field. 

How are we paying for it all? Our war costs 
us almost £7,000,000 a day or about $35,000,000. 
That includes the payment of troops, the cost of 
their upkeep and equipment, and the loans to our 
Allies. Before the war our national debt was 
£645,000,000 sterling. By September, 19 17, it 
had risen to £5,000,000,000, of which £1,100,- 
000,000 had been lent to our Allies and £160,- 
000,000 to overseas Dominions. Multiply these 
sums by five and you will get their equivalent in 
dollars. 

We are meeting this enormous expenditure 
partly by taxation and partly by war loans. Our 
income-tax, including super-tax, will yield, it is 
estimated, during the coming year £224,000,000, 
and the excess profits tax £180,000,000 leaving 
£208,000,000 to be derived from other sources, 
including indirect taxation. At the same time 
the prices of the necessaries of life have very 
largely increased. I may say, that our middle 
classes have to meet the doubled cost of living on 
about two-thirds of their former income. 

With regard to our war loans, of which we 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 67 

have had a number, I have to say this first of all. 
Their results have surprised us beyond measure. 
In each case the amount subscribed has been be- 
yond what was asked for and far beyond what 
was anticipated. I give you the following illus- 
trations for your encouragement in similar efforts, 
speaking as I do while you are engaged in raising 
your third Liberty Loan. I feel sure from what 
I have seen and heard that your experience will 
be similar to ours. 

Our last War Loan, raised In January and 
February of this year, amounted to £1,000,000,- 
000 sterling, which, however. Included £130,000,- 
000 of converted Exchequer Bonds, while the im- 
mediately preceding loan was only £616,000,000. 
For the latter there were 1,100,000 subscribers, 
but for that of this year the subscribers were 
5,289,000. 

This loan was collected In war-Tanks which 
had been at the front and were now sent round our 
principal cities. One of them came to Aberdeen 
on the last day of January. The population of 
Aberdeen Is a little over 160,000. In five days 
that Tank had collected £2,500,000 — that is to 
say $12,500,000. Deducting a proportion of this 
as contributed by the surrounding district, we may 



68 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

say that $10,000,000 were contributed by 160,000 
of a population. In Dundee, with a slightly 
larger population, they raised over £4,000,000, or 
$20,000,000. In Glasgow, with over 1,000,000 
population, they raised, also in five days, £14,- 
000,000, or $70,000,000. London, where the 
Tanks had opened their campaign with somewhat 
meagre results, when she saw what the provinces 
had done, made another effort, and in March 
raised no less than £74,000,000. Multiply that 
by five and you get the amount in dollars. And 
some other centres of population, for which I 
have not the figures, did even better. 

All this has astonished us by its proof not only 
of the amount but of the mobility of our wealth. 
We have seen what we can do under the urgency 
of a great and a righteous cause. But it has 
caused us to reflect on the meagreness of our giv- 
ings in times past to the causes, no less urgent, 
of peace. We see to our shame how easy it would 
have been, had our consciences been equally 
roused, to give far larger sums than we used to 
devote to education, to housing, and to the other 
needs of our population. I trust that the lesson 
will abide with us when peace comes again, and 
we have to tackle the reconstruction of our social 



BRITAIN'S PART IN THE WAR 69 

welfare. But in the meantime you and we have 
to win the war. The costs of it are still enormous. 
Take the sum which I have quoted as raised in 
five days by my fellow-citizens in Aberdeen — 
£2,500,000. That hardly amounts to the cost of 
eight hours of the war. 



I have now to speak of our costlier sacrifices 
in men. I am told that "during the first sixteen 
months of the war the casualties totalled 550,- 
000 or about 78 per cent, of the entire original 
land-forces". This brings us to the end of 19 15. 
In 19 1 6, they were 650,000 and in 19 17, 800,000, 
"due mainly to the heavy fighting in Flanders dur- 
ing which we had 27,000 men killed in one 
month," and to the battles of Arras and Mes- 
sines. "The figures for the great battles which 
began on 21st March, 19 18, are not yet available, 
but the total of British officer casualties published 
in April alone exceeds 10,000." 

As I have said in a previous address there is 
hardly a family in our land but has contributed 
a son, a brother, a husband, or a father, to this 
awful list. Our slain number very many hundreds 



70 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

of thousands. The national loss in the sacrifice 
of so many rich and promising lives is immeas- 
urable. It is our duty to see that it shall not be in 
vain. We say, as our fallen would say with us, 
that it has not been in vain. But for the future — 
if such loss lead to the victory of right over 
wrong; if it avenge the banished and the tortured; 
if once for all it warn the world from the 
fatality of broken faith; if it not only preserve 
the traditions and liberties of our free Empire 
but secure the same freedom for all the weaker 
nations of the world; if, still more, the example 
of the courage and willing self-sacrifice of our 
youth quicken those of us who remain to unsel- 
fishness and purity, and pour down all the com- 
mon ways of peace the heroism which war has 
evoked, it will not be in vain. 

The example of our sons and brothers is upon 
us with a moral power such as no generation in all 
our history has ever before felt the weight of. 
When we are tempted to lose heart in the fierce- 
ness of the struggle or the prospect of the long 
and arduous way we have still to travel to peace, 
we rekindle our flickering courage at the imperish- 
able flame of their devotion. 



THE BRITISH HOPE AND ITS 
GROUNDS 



Ill 

THE BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 

We meet to-day under the impression of events 
as stupendous as any that ever challenged the con- 
science and the mind of man. We cannot measure 
them nor forecast their consequences. But it lies 
with us to see that they neither bewilder us nor 
distract our hearts from our faith and duty in 
a warfare which is no less ours who are here than 
it is theirs, sons of both our peoples, who watch 
for us on the seas or who fight for us on the fronts 
of the greatest war of all time. Their strength 
and their valour have proved up till now in- 
domitable — indomitable even in defeat; but their 
victory hangs on the steadiness and fidelity of 
their peoples behind them. The strain is uni- 
versal — if your people have not yet all felt it they 
shall before many weeks or months are past. The 
strain is universal, the sacrifices required must 
be borne by all, and the issue under God depends 

73 



74 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

on the understanding, the courage, and the reso- 
lution of our peoples as a whole. 

What I propose to do, in this my first discourse 
on the war to an American audience,^ is to offer 
a summary account of what we in Great Britain 
have felt and have dared since first we were forced 
into the war three and three-quarter years ago; 
what we felt we stood for and stand for still, 
and what has given us strength, first to decide 
upon our duty in the few hours when decision was 
open to us; then to make up for our almost ab- 
solute unpreparedness for war; and then and all 
along to bear the strain and the constantly in- 
creasing sacrifice and agony, imposed on us to 
an extent far beyond our worst fears at the start 
of it. In the present crisis such a review may be 
of some use to you for two reasons. First, the 
United States stand to-day to the war on pretty 
much the same stage as that on which we found 
ourselves during its first months. You have mo- 
bilised your manhood for fighting, and are push- 
ing to the front a relatively small but a compact, 
eager and valiant army to the help of your Allies, 
and particularly of France, against a resolute 

^ Delivered first to a public meeting in Union Semi- 
nary, New York, on 2nd April, 191 8. 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 75 

German invasion that not only has Paris for its 
goal, but seeks nothing short of the dismember- 
ment of France and the crushing of her people. 
That was precisely our position in August, 19 14, 
when General French led his force of only some 
160,000 men through Normandy and Flanders 
to the borders of Belgium, and we had still before 
us our years of strain and costly sacrifice. And 
in the second place, I hope to be able to show you 
by my survey what exactly the armed accession of 
America to our sacred Alliance has meant to us 
morally — has meant to us French and British 
peoples, war-strained and war-weary as we are 
and working and fighting to the pitch of our 
power there, years before you were able to join us. 
From the first the call to ourselves and to our 
Allies was clear and signal like every call upon 
the conscience. Our duty was immediate and 
simple — to resist a powerful and treacherous as- 
sault upon the peace and liberties of the world — 
however unprepared we knew ourselves to be — ^to 
resist it to the uttermost, and that not only on be- 
half of the outraged people, to whose security we 
had pledged our word twice over, but (as we in- 
stinctively felt) in defence of justice and of free- 
dom all round the world. You know what a 



76 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

good conscience we had in this matter. Germany 
had broken her word to Europe. Suddenly and 
without excuse — for the assertion that France in- 
tended an invasion of Belgium was an after- 
thought and a falsehood — suddenly and without 
excuse the German Government violated the 
neutrality it had twice sworn with us to maintain, 
and shattered the faith on which the amity of 
nations is founded. Nor was this an isolated con- 
spiracy against the peace of the world. Up to 
the verge of breaking with our friends of France 
and Russia, our Government urged proposals of 
arbitration upon the question of Serbia, which, 
accepted by other powers, Germany alone de- 
clined. Sir Edward Grey, as Prince Lichnowsky 
admits, did everything possible to maintain peace. 
But the German mind was determined and had 
long been determined upon war, and for two 
frankly avowed reasons — that it thought itself 
superior to the minds of all other civilised 
peoples, and saw in war its chance of asserting 
that superiority and establishing its domination 
over the world. Why, Germans were shouting 
that in your own thresholds ! Towards the close 
of 1 9 14, a leading German journalist (Max Har- 
den) in the "New York Times" exhorted his Ger- 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 77 

man kinsmen in the States "to cease the pitiful 
attempts to excuse Germany's action. Not as 
weak-willed blunderers have we undertaken this 
war. We wanted it because we had to will it and 
could will it. It strikes the hour of Germany's 
rising power." There you have it — "the Un- 
bounded Will" as they call it themselves, superior 
to the moral law and reckless of humanity. 

And with our Allies we did resist and break at 
least this wider menace to mankind. The claims 
of the culture of modern Germany to impose 
itself upon the world by right of sheer will and 
brute power as well as of boasted worth, were 
lowered on the Marne, on the Aisne and before 
Ypres, by forces inferior to the German in every 
material respect, but endowed with the super- 
natural strength of men who knew that they were 
fighting for all that is highest and most precious in 
human life. The accent of the enemy began to 
falter. He lessened his claims, though he did not 
render them less fantastic. From the right to 
organise the world in her own spirit, Germany fell 
back on the hegemony of Central Europe over the 
rest of the Continent; upon a claim to a gateway 
to the East which no one had denied her and 
which she had been fast winning already in the 



78 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

days of peace; upon a spurious championship of 
the freedom of the seas — and at last from all 
these upon the cry that she was fighting, and from 
the first had been fighting, only in self-defence. 
That Is, they who had at the outset refused to 
plead any excuse for their war on mankind except 
that they willed it because they had to will it and 
could will it, now deny that they ever did so — and 
seek to throw the blame for war upon their noto- 
riously reluctant and unready opponents. Of 
every phase of this shifting pretence Belgium, 
Serbia, Poland, Roumania, and now the conquered 
provinces of Russia are the damning exposure. 
On the other side, the conscience and declared 
duty of the Allies have remained the same. The 
strain, the costs, and the sacrifices have infinitely 
exceeded our worst fears. But that has made no 
difference to our duty. For the cost of a duty can 
never affect Its urgency; and among our faculties 
conscience Is the one which feels a strain only as an 
added strength. The promise has been fulfilled, 
as so often before in history. To the bare sense 
of righteousness with which our nation entered 
the war all things have been added — men, re- 
sources, and powers of mind of which we had not 
dreamt ourselves capable. In France and on more 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 79 

than one Eastern front the will to fight for fight- 
ing's sake, or for tyranny, proved inferior on the 
field to the will to fight in defence of the oppressed 
for justice and freedom. 

For the moment this proof may be obscured. 
Italy, with full victory almost in her grasp, has 
been beaten back to the Piave; where, however, 
she stands firm. The fresh German offensive still 
advances, reinforced by the troops which her 
fraud on Russia has released for the Western 
front. And Russia has failed us: Russia which 
up till a year ago had rendered to our Cause so 
many and so effectual sacrifices. The war has 
let loose forces of which in its first days few 
dreamt, and fewer still made serious reckoning. 
Political movements, slowly gathering in depths 
no war controls, have burst and swept across not 
only the lines of strategy but the shining path- 
ways to those Ideas by which the warfare of the 
Allies has been Inspired. Our Cause and our duty 
to It lie to-day beneath a heavier strain than we 
have felt since the winter of 19 14. The end of 
our warfare which appeared reasonably near has 
been indefinitely prolonged, and costs and sac- 
rifices are already upon us greater even than those 
which we have endured during the past terrible 



80 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

years. On what have we rallied our minds — our 
minds and hearts — beneath so aggravated and pro- 
longed a test? On, I believe, three things: first, 
the memory that such trials are not new in the his- 
tory of our people, but that in God's Providence 
our fathers passed through them, and even 
worse, to victory over a tyranny similar to that 
which threatens us ; second, faith in the undimin- 
ished righteousness and urgency of our Cause; and 
third, the example of those who have already 
fought, and died, for it and for us. 



I take the memory first not because it is the 

most decisive, but it comes first chronologically. 
The two wars which our fathers waged against 
Napoleon between 1793 and 18 15 (for the 
Waterloo campaign was but the appendix of the 
second) — these two wars separated by the incon- 
clusive peace of Amiens in 1802 — present in their 
conditions, and the trials to which they subjected 
our people, extraordinary resemblances to the war 
of to-day. We entered them as we entered this in 
coalition with other nations of Europe, whom also 
as now we had to finance ; so that as to-day our 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 81 

national debt went up by leaps and bounds. At 
first Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Spain were 
with us, but one by one they fell off and Britain 
stood practically alone against the tyrant. Hol- 
land fell to him at a blow as Belgium has fallen 
to Germany. Lombardy was not merely threat- 
ened as now, but wholly overrun by the young 
conqueror. Though, as to-day, we had some vic- 
tories in the far East, we had been defeated in 
Holland; war fostered by the intrigues and bribes 
of the enemy was raised against us in India ; there 
was an Irish rebellion; and also just as to-day 
there was sore trouble with the neutral states, who 
claimed the right to carry contraband of war and 
indeed went further and armed themselves to en- 
force that right. Then, as now, the enemy pro- 
posed peace, really in order to find his breath for 
future conquests. We accepted his proposals. 
Everybody knows the inconclusiveness of the 
Peace of Amiens in 1802 and how war broke out 
the following year. It is a warning to us now; its 
terms of "mutual restitution" leaving the tyrant's 
powerful will to war untouched, just as they would 
leave Germany's if we were to listen to her offers 
of them. Refreshed by the armistice Napoleon 
threw off every disguise, set up his Empire, un- 



82 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

made the republics he had created, and menaced 
every nationality within his reach. In 1803 Sir 
James Mackintosh wrote: "Every other monu- 
ment of European liberty has perished. That 
ancient fabric which has been gradually raised 
by the wisdom and virtue of our forefathers still 
stands; but it stands alone and it stands among 
ruins." To Britain, therefore, Napoleon directed 
his ambition and planned her invasion. The im- 
mediate response was the enrolment of 300,000 
volunteers. By Pitt's care our people formed a 
new coalition. But in 1807 Russia again failed 
us and made her peace with France. Spain, by an 
act of treachery, became a kingdom of the French 
Empire; Holland was already another of the 
same. In 1 809 we held upon the Continent only 
a piece of Portugal, and Moore's retreat on Co- 
rufia, even though tempered by his victory there, 
reduced the nation wellnigh to despair. Our 
blunders were many both abroad and at home; 
and there were grave moral defections among cer- 
tain classes of the people just as now — as Words- 
worth notes "rapine, avarice, and expense". But 
the Government and the nation pressed on, and 
though Austria failed us, and it took Wellington 
full four years to advance from Torres Vedras to 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 83 

the gates of Paris, Napoleon at last yielded in 
1 8 14. And from 18 12 onwards we had also on 
our hands a war with you of the United States. 

What to all those troubles are our present ones 
— even the great danger that now besets our Cause 
from the paralysis of Russia and the defeat of 
Italy? 

Yet our fathers prevailed; and we know from 
Wordsworth — Wordsworth who followed the 
fluctuations of the war with an incomparable 
series of poems — we know from him what it was 
that kept Britain, with all her faults and blunders, 
steadfast to the victorious end. With Mackin- 
tosh, whom I have quoted, he saw, and the nation 
saw, that earth's best hopes hung upon the Cause 
for which his country fought so long alone ; that 
the issue was "victory or death" — death to all that 
makes a nation virtuous and wise ; that the enemy 
was 

Impatient to put out the only light 
Of Liberty that remains on earth; 

Ihat 

In ourselves our safety must be bought, 
That by our own right hands it must be wrought, 
That we must stand unpropped or be laid low. 
O dastard whom such foretaste doth not cheer! 



84 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 



Yet even such courage and tenacity are helpless 
for victory except they be the instruments of a 
righteous cause. When Bonaparte a second time 
broke the peace of Europe all its powers joined in 
the declaration that "he has deprived himself of 
the protection of the laws, and made it evident in 
face of the universe that there can be no longer 
peace or truce with him. The Powers declare 
that ... as the general enemy and disturber 
of the world he is abandoned to public justice." 
But such had been the instinct of the British 
nation with or without Allies all along — all along 
these twenty-two years of war against the tyrant. 

O joyless power that stands by lawless force 

And if old judgments keep their sacred course, 
Him from that height shall heaven precipitate. 

I need not draw the moral for ourselves, in ad- 
versities less severe, with Allies more assured, 
and with a Cause, if possible, still more just and 
sacred. 

To the proclamation of Napoleon's outlawry 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 85 

your own President's words regarding Germany 
offer a close parallel : — 

"The German power, a thing without con- 
science, honour, or capacity for covenanted peace, 
must be crushed. . . . Our present and imme- 
diate task is to win the war and nothing shall turn 
us aside until it is accomplished." 

I have already spoken of the things that have 
been added to our Cause in proportion to our 
belief in it, and to the works by which we have 
shown our faith: our vast armies, mountains of 
munitions, and other fresh resources, a new ex- 
perience of the extent and mobility of our wealth, 
the discovery of unexpected capacities of organisa- 
tion, of devotion, of endurance. But above all you 
have joined us, not only with your boundless re- 
sources of material and energy; but with your 
national record of never having put your minds 
and hearts to any just cause but you have carried 
it to victory; and with this further moral rein- 
forcement of our conscience and will that after 
two and a half years of deliberation, and of ex- 
perimenting with the enemy by every possible 
means of peace, you came to that same conclusion 
to which we had to rise in a few hours, when the 
war was rushed on us — ^that Germany must be 



86 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

fought out on the field if the freedom and peace of 
the world are to be rendered secure. What a vin- 
dication you have given us of our original in- 
stincts of duty!^ What a remedy for the moral 
distractions of these years of fluctuating war! 
What a full compensation for the collapse of our 
most potential Ally ! What a buttress against the 
threatened fall of the Italian front and ours, and 
the French retreat before the new German offen- 
sive ! Subtract Russia as we must — and even Italy 
if your fears compel you to do so, though I think 
they are unfounded, for Italy now stands and is 
certain to advance again — ^you still have these 
three, France, Britain, and America : surely an in- 
domitable alliance both in battle and in the coun- 
sels that shall after this establish for the world a 
free, a just, and a lasting peace. 

Yet whatever be our Allies and our resources, 
to us British it is the Cause that matters; and we 
feel that it shall be woe to us if either by a negli- 
gent war or by a timid and selfish peace we im- 
peril the interests of that Cause and the future of 
the world that hangs upon it. Whether we look 
at that Cause or the material resources it has 
evoked by the sheer strength of its justice, we have 
* See above, Address I. 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 87 

no reason, even to-day, for aught but faith in God, 
courage and a confident hope — 

Hope the paramount duty that Heaven lays, 
For its own honour, on man's suffering heart. 



I have left but little time to speak of the third 
of the strong things on which in these dark days 
we British have rallied our hearts: the example 
of those who for us and for our Cause have fought 
and died. But indeed, except for our vows, words 
are not needed where deeds have been so sacra- 
mental. Righteous in itself, our Cause and the 
hopes it has gathered have been further hallowed 
by the volume of sacrifice they have evoked. Our 
hearts feel the steadying and the cleansing power 
of these examples. Our young men who have 
fallen gave their lives when still out of sight of 
victory, and cheered by nought beyond their sense 
of duty and devotion to a high ideal. But they 
did so — for the most part in conditions neither of 
glory nor even of promise — because sustained by 
the assurance that they fought and died not for 
the moment nor for themselves, perhaps not even 
for their own generation, but for the future — a 



88 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

far off, but, as God reigns, a certain and a blessed 
future for the world. They were willing and 
cheerfully willing that it should be so. They have 
left their warfare unfinished, have left it to us in 
the confidence that we shall see it through, and 
win for humanity the fulfilment of the ideals for 
which they have died. We are ready to carry on 
in their spirit, and if it must be that we see neither 
victory nor peace for ourselves, to secure these by 
our patience and sacrifice for the generations to 
come — ^to fight till the will to war is broken and 
consents to disarmament and the restoration of 
freedom. No other end is worth struggling for: 
we dare no other with these examples behind and 
about us. I leave you with the words of one who 
not only expressed this spirit with a rare direct- 
ness, but fought in it and laid down his own life 
for it soon after he had written them — Robert 
Vernede : — ' 

If through this roar o' the guns one prayer may reach 
Thee, 

Lord of all life, whose mercies never sleep, 
Not in our time, not now, Lord, we beseech Thee 

To grant us peace. The sword has bit too deep. 

We see all fair things fouled — ^homes love's hands builded 
Shattered to dust beside their withered vines, 



BRITISH HOPE AND ITS GROUNDS 89 

Shattered the towers that once Thy sunsets gilded, 
And Christ struck yet again within His shrines. 

Hark the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken — 
We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now: 

Hearts high as theirs, who went to death unshaken, 
Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow. 

Then to our children there shall be no handing 
Of fates so vain — of passions so abhorr'd . . , 

But Peace . . . the Peace which passeth understand- 
ing .. . 
Not in our time . . . but in their time, O Lord. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 



m 

THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 

Americans, the conscience which we share in 
this war is not ours alone. It is France's and 
Italy's and Belgium's and that of all our Allies. 
There never was an Alliance so closely bound by 
a common conscience. In this address I wish to 
speak of France's witness to the character of our 
aims. It is one of the most vivid of all the allied 
testimonies to the justice of our Cause. With that 
power of intuition in which they excel, the French 
though sorely divided as a people, sprang from 
the first to the moral issues of the war with a unan- 
imity that surprised themselves and the world. 
And French being, as one has said, "the language 
in which thought rises most easily to the surface,"^ 
they have expressed their convictions with a clarity 
and fulness beyond the rest of us. In its individ- 
ual forms, as when speaking of faith and God 
^ R. W. Barbour. 
93 



94 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

and the other life, the French testimony fre- 
quently contrasts with the greater reticence of our 
own soldiers. We understand and respect the 
latter, but we turn to those spiritual confidences 
of French fighters as to a day of southern sunshine. 
Remember too, that as France, of all the greater 
Allies, has suffered most from the war, her moral 
witness Is the more appealing. 

We shall best approach our subject by recalling 
the state of the French people before war broke 
out. It Is not extravagant to say that of all civil- 
ised peoples this was then the most divided, fis- 
sured, and rent. 

There was first, the widest and bitterest of all 
schisms, the religious, which has been firmly set, 
though not started, by the Revolution. In no 
country has the opposition to religion, the pro- 
fession of sheer atheism, been more resolute, out- 
spoken, or aggressive. The conflict had again 
come to a head, some few years ago, over the 
divorce of the Church by the State. With the 
principle of that divorce many in my country, and 
(I suppose) all In yours would sympathise. But 
It was largely inspired by hostility to religion as 
well as to the Church, and It was carried out with 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 95 

heavy exactions and deprivations. The bitterness 
became intense, and the parties appeared to be ir- 
reconcilable. 

Then there were the political divisions, some of 
them crossing the religious. In the domestic 
politics of France more groups and factions ex- 
isted than perhaps in any other civilised commu- 
nity. You remember with what bewildering rapid- 
ity they overturned and succeeded each other in 
the Government of the country. M. Paul Saba- 
tier has described the "extreme mutual animosity 
of the various political parties." "Political pas- 
sions were raised to such a pitch that the very 
foundations of the moral unity of the country 
seemed to be shattered thereby. 'Do you always 
devour one another in France?' I was asked not 
very long before the war, by a German diplo- 
matist. ... It was only too true — ^the French 
were devouring one another." ^ 

[Another Frenchman has said that "Catholics, 
Protestants, Jews, Free-thinkers, Trade-Union- 
ists, Internationalists, Traditionalists, were moved 

^ "A Frenchman's Thoughts on the War," translated 
by Bernard Miall. London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 
1915- 



96 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

by forces which drove us at each other's 
throats".^] 

But now there is no people more united than 
are the French. They present to us all the ex- 
ample of unity — of ungrudging comradeship 
among all sects and parties in devotion to a com- 
mon aim — an example which is one of the sharp- 
est edges on the solidity of our great Alliance. 

How has this wonderful change come about? 
Certainly not by the mere physical pressure of 
self-defence, nor mainly by a community of suf- 
fering. These indeed have been so terrible that 
they might have been deemed sufficient to ac- 
count for the effect on the national temper. When 
we British go to France we become silent about 
our own sacrifices. We have not seen one of our 
richest provinces pass into the hands of the 
enemy. We have not had our minerals and our 
industries ruthlessly exploited, nor our towns 

^ Maurice Barres, "The Faith of France." I did not 
read this volume till I was returning from America. I 
have entered a few quotations, which I make from it 
in this address, in square brackets. They are taken from 
the translation by Elizabeth Marbury, with introduc- 
tion by Dr. Henry Van Dyke. Houghton Mifflin Co., 
igi8. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 97 

ruined, nor many of our villages erased and their 
rich fields tortured and poisoned or turned into 
vast cemeteries. We have not had great sections 
of our population deported to till the enemy's 
lands, nor our women and children enslaved nor 
— in the same awful number at least — murdered 
by his policy of "frightfulness." But from all 
these agonies France has suffered for four years. 
Yet the French will tell you — and this is true — 
that it is not the fires of that material furnace 
which have fused them into one — which have 
tempered the steel front they present to the foe. 
They are now compact and sympathetic, not by 
the necessity of fighting for their national exist- 
ence, but by the conscience which, to judge from 
countless declarations by their soldiers and from 
their literature on the war, all parties feel in them- 
selves and recognise in each other : the conscience 
of the moral character of the struggle forced upon 
them. A community of spirit has descended on this 
sorely divided people, and the spirit is something 
greater than the spirit of patriotism. Factions and 
sects have forgotten themselves not merely in the 
larger self of France, but — as I shall quote to you 
from their own words — in a France which is fight- 
ing for humanity and a new world, against a power 



98 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

absolutely hostile to those spiritual ideals that are 
mankind's highest Interests. It is striking how the 
word glory, which the world indentified with 
France, has been replaced in her books and In the 
letters of her soldiers by the words duty and sac- 
rifice. You Americans remember the idealism 
and disinterestedness of those first French who in 
the days before Napoleon came to fight for your 
freedom. The French of to-day are showing the 
same idealism and disinterestedness, but on a 
larger scale and under a far more terrible test. 

The testimonies to this spiritual devotion that 
I shall quote I take mainly from two books which 
the war has brought forth in France. One gives 
us the witness of her intellectuals, men for the 
most part of no religious confession, some of 
whom before the war abjured religion altogether; 
and the other the witness of French Catholics. 
And I shall add to these the testimony of some 
French Protestants. 

In "L'Universite et la Guerre,"^ M. Thamin, 
Rector of the Academy of Bordeaux, quoting 
from the letters of many schoolmasters and other 
graduates engaged on the Front, gives us not only 
the testimony of Intelligent and educated men, who 
^ Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1916. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 99 

had previously been indifferent or hostile to re- 
ligion, to the spiritual ideals which now inspired 
them, and the religious spirit these have awakened 
in them, but their tribute as well to the equally 
ethical and unselfish temper they recognise in the 
Catholics along with whom they are proud to fight, 
shoulder to shoulder, in the same trenches. Amply 
supported by the evidence he quotes, M. Thamin 
declares of the trained, thinking men of whom he 
writes that it was their mobilisation which dis- 
covered them to themselves and developed the 
faith, the sense of duty, the wonderful tranquillity 
and even joy in their terrible tasks, of which they 
had not before known themselves to be capable. 
He does not exaggerate when he sums it up in 
these words: — 

"It had to be that this extraordinary war 
should mobilise the ideas after the men. All 
the ideas of France are ranged in battle. The 
country has again acknowledged that which it 
believed, the University that which it taught. 
There is the secret of this mutually reinforced 
confidence; there also is one of the secrets of 
a unanimity which surprises ourselves. The 
most unbelieving have discovered for them- 
selves a faith, the most realist an ideal; and 



100 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

They are at the bottom of the soul of those 
this faith and this ideal are the same for all. 
even, who acknowledge [getting] them .from 
others."! 

"For us it is a philosophic crusade which is 
at stake. The word has been printed for the 
first time, I believe, by M. Boutroux. But 
the thought has been often expressed. More 
conscious for the intellectual elite, it has pene- 
trated the souls of all the combatants, and be- 
comes for them a supplementary principle of 
courage. All have heard the same voices. 
And though one of them has spoken it more 
loudly to us, all have more or less felt descend 
on them as it were the supernatural succour of 
the idea for which they struggle. They know 
that it cannot prevent them from dying, but 
that It itself does not die, and that the gates 
of hell shall not prevail against it." ^ 
And M. Thamin quotes from the letter of a 
teacher to himself : — 

"Even under the cannon we do not forget 

the ideal for which we combat. To know 

that the accomplishment of our present duty 

surpasses in range both our own person and 

^ P. 1 60. ^V. 162. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 101 

our time and even our country — since it con- 
cerns humanity in the most profound and com- 
plete sense of the word — is to us a stimulus 
of incalculable vigour. This sentiment you 
will not find only among those whom a certain 
culture has refined and rendered fully con- 
scious of the role which they play; you will 
find it again very powerful, though necessarily 
a little vague, among the humblest and least 
cultivated of the soldiers."^ 
[In illustration of this last sentence we may 
take the following, quoted by M. Barres, from the 
answer of "a simple man" to the question of a 
neutral journalist, in the winter of 1914-15, as to 
what he was fighting for: "Simply that more gen- 
tiles se prevail in the world". And another soldier, 
in 19 15, said: "The spiritual element is the dom- 
inating force in this war".^] M, Thamin also 
gives instances of the recognition by his intellec- 
tuals of the equally disinterested devotion of their 
Catholic comrades and of the reciprocal feelings 
of the latter. He quotes the homage of a Jesuit 
father to his captain, a state-teacher, and he adds 
this sentence from a teacher, a sub-lieutenant: "Be- 
lieve, that among the most brave, without boast- 

^P. 31- ^Pp. xiv, xvi. 



102 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

ing, there are always found a teacher and a cure".^ 
On the other side, the Cathohc, we have that 
remarkable book, "L'AUemagne et les Allies de- 
vant la Conscience chretienne".^ It bears the Im- 
primatur of the Cardinal-Archbishop of Paris, 
and consists of nine essays by leading clerics and 
laymen of the Gallican Church. They are writ- 
ten in answer to the Catholics of Germany, who 
had violently reproached their fellow-churchmen 
in France with supporting a political system and 
a national temper which were anti-Christian, with 
allying themselves to Britain and Russia, who not 
only were responsible for the war (to which poor 
Germany had to submit in self-defence) but are, 
either as Britain is, Protestant and free-thinking, 
or, as Russia, schismatic and hostile to Catholi- 
cism. The different essays engage themselves with 
these points. They quietly but very firmly con- 
vict Germany of the sole responsibility for the war. 
They expose her crimes in violating the neutrality 
of Belgium, in cruelly treating her prisoners of 
war and the civilians of the countries she has wan- 
tonly invaded, in being accessory to the Armenian 
massacres, and in attempting to excite the Moslem 

^ Pp. 21, 22. ^ Paris: Bloud et Gay [1916]. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 103 

world to a "holy war" against Christians. They 
have no difficulty in exposing that characteristic 
lack of humour, which permits German Catholics, 
more than half of whose countrymen are Luther- 
ans, and so many of them rationalists, to reproach 
French Catholics with their friendship for "Eng- 
lish Protestants and free-thinkers". But they go 
deeper and discover that the present war, as a 
whole, is one between essentially Christian ideals 
which inspire France and all her Allies, and the 
German ideals that are fundamentally immoral 
and anti-Christian. Monsignor Chapon, the 
Bishop of Nice, in meeting the charge that French 
Catholics have become partners with a Govern- 
ment in France, whose principles are atheistic and 
whose policy has been inspired by malignity to- 
wards all religion, admits the injustice and cruelty 
which his Church has suffered from the State. Yet 
(he says) these notwithstanding, the French 
Catholics are with the French Government to- 
day, because it and the people behind it oppose, 
with the vision and generous courage that are 
characteristic of the race, ideals of justice and 
freedom which are necessary to the peace of the 
world and the brotherhood of nations, against a 
German philosophy and policy, which would surely 



104 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

be fatal to these. The Bishop boldly declares for 
the essential Christianity of the principles of the 
French Revolution — Liberty, Equality, and Fra- 
ternity — which, as he justly shows, have their 
deepest sources In the Gospel of Jesus. And as 
justly he contrasts the German philosophy of the 
State, as a thing above moral law and deriving its 
authority from power alone, with the dominant 
French Idea of the State, as merely the larger 
family. In which the rights of the individual on the 
one hand, and the duties of the nation to other 
nations, are carefully observed. There can be no 
doubt which of these is the Christian philosophy, 
and therefore deserving of the support of the 
Church. Or as Monsignor Baudrillart puts it in 
his "Avertissement" to the volume: — 

"Monsignor the Bishop of Nice shows that, 
in very reality, behind the facts and the crimes, 
behind all the warlike enterprise of to-day, 
with the proceedings It Involves, there is a 
doctrine which consecrates, Inspires, and 
directs it; the culture and the militarism of 
Germany strictly hold together ; they only exist 
the one by the other and the one for the other; 
pan-Germanism has become a theory of the 
world, a philosophy, a religion ; it has informe 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 105 

the German soul to the pitch of appearing 
to have engrossed It altogether. France, 
whatever be her errors, has at least not In- 
carnated them to the point of making them her 
own with unanimity and of fixing herself in 
them as in the absolute. Moreover, the ideal 
which she professes Is a generous ideal, which, 
in the last analysis can be reconciled with the 
Christian Ideal". ^ 
M. Bompard, the French Ambassador to the 
Porte, has given a vivid picture of how Catholic 
clerics and laymen, monks and nuns, professors, 
teachers and others, who had been driven from 
France by the laws against the Church, flocked 
back through Constantinople from the further 
East, on the declaration of war, in order to return 
to their fatherland and take service either in the 
combatant or the medical units of her forces. In 
their ardour they struggled with each other for 
passages home. For they said (I cannot give you 
the exact words, but they were In substance these) : 
"The sins of our own Mother are as snow com- 
pared with the scarlet guilt of the German power". 
I am told that by 19 15 there were no fewer than 
25,000 French priests in the fighting ranks of 
ip. vi. 



106 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

France, of whom looo had given their lives for 
the Allied Cause. 

Nor have the French Protestants been behind 
their countrymen in conscience and courage. By 
October, 1917, 450 pastors had been mobilised 
and 120 students of divinity. [Another estimate 
gives 68 Protestant chaplains and "scattered 
throughout the ranks as officers or soldiers 340 
more . . . not a large number — but how many 
Protestanft pastors are there in the whole of 
France? A thousand at the outside, including all 
sects''.^] By the above date there had died for 
their country 23 pastors, 4 evangelists, and 31 
students. Here is the witness of one of them, 
Alfred Eugene Casalis, an undergraduate of the 
University of Montauban. "Too young to be 
called up; but though strongly and even passion- 
ately opposed to war and militarism, he could not 
stand by while others were giving their lives. 
. . . He had Volunteered' for the Mission 
Field, and in the same spirit Volunteered' to serve 
his country and her righteous cause. . . . 
Young as he was — barely nineteen — he looked 
upon the France of 19 14 not as she was, but as 

^ Barres, "The Faith of France," translated by Eliza- 
beth Marbury, p. 48. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 107 

she might one day be. With the clear vision of 
the soldier-mystic and the soldier-lover, he beheld 
his Ideal France, the France of to-morrow, rising 
renewed and purified from the ashes of the war. 
For that France he not only laid down his life 
with all its gifts and promises, but poured out his 
soul, praying only that whatever of spiritual force 
might have dwelt in himself should by his death 
flow out and inspire all who had shared his own 
efforts and ideals."^ 

"I am a soldier, of my own free will, and 
not by compulsion. What can one do! It 
is all very well to be a pacifist, there are cir- 
cumstances in which nothing can hold one back. 
To begin with, when we see what atrocities 
our enemies commit, we can't help realising 
that they must be put a stop to as quickly as 
possible, and if one can help in doing that, one 
must lend a hand at once. And when you 
know there are such creatures as slackers, 
people who are shirking their bit, one can't 

^ "A Young Soldier of France and of Jesus Christ : 
Letters of Alfred Eugene Casalis, 191 5," translated by 
C. W. Mackintosh. Eastbourne: Strange the Printer 
Ltd., 1916. 



108 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

hang back : one must come out.^ The cardinal 
virtue of the Christian soldier Is tenacity, Hold 
fast that which thou hast. ... I shall 
fight with a good conscience and without fear, 
I hope, certainly without hate, because I be- 
lieve our cause to be just, because France vic- 
torious will have a mission to fulfil, in elevat- 
ing and educating mankind for brotherhood. 
I believe this, because I myself have accepte'd 
this vocation, and because I know many others 
who have made It theirs. I feel myself filled 
with an Illimitable hope, which shows me 
through death the beginnings of a renewed and 
glorious life . . . you have no idea of the 
peace in which I live. . . . Francis Monod, 
Robert Prunler, and others, many others have 
died thinking of this glorious reign which 
must come, which Is coming. Their death Is a 
step towards the coming of this Kingdom, as 
was their life. And then the new France must 
stand up for that : 'to make Christ King'. We 
take oath of allegiance, Lord; we will work to 
bring about Thy Kingdom: we will give our 
lives for that Ideal." 
Then at the fighting front he wrote : — 
ip. 14. 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 109 

"Often I dream of the France that is to be, 
the France that will be born of the 'War for 
Freedom'. She must understand that it is her 
duty to be humane. . . . For me, military 
life has simplified everything. Things have 
taken on their true values, their full signifi- 
cance. Difliculties which have seemed almost 
insurmountable for me have disappeared. In- 
tellectual sacrifices which I thought I could 
never accept have accomplished themselves al- 
most unconsciously and without a pang. And 
instead of them I find a new vitality, an in- 
tense desire for action. And with this al- 
ways peace. . . . My central preoccupation 
is as to the legitimacy of this war. I am con- 
fident our cause is just and good, and that we 
have right on our side. But it is essential that 
this war should be fruitful as well, and that 
from all these deaths a new life should spring 
forth for humanity." 
How amply he had fulfilled the noble resolu- 
tions he made on his first call to serve : — 

"We must search our hearts to see whether 
we can fight . . . whether we have firmly 
resolved to be the champions of Right, of Jus- 
tice, and of Liberty; whether we are suffi- 



110 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

ciently in love with the Justice that must be 
established afterwards to fight in the certainty 
that our victory will give another good work- 
man to the task of universal regeneration. . . . 
"That is the Vigil for us. And our watch- 
word is 'Christ and France'." 
Alfred Eugene Casalis fell on the 9th May, 
19 15, at Roclincourt, Artois, when charging with 
his company against the foe. 

[M. Barres gives us other utterances of Pro- 
testants, some indicating the inner conflict they 
felt between their Christian heart for peace and 
their sense of duty to a cause so manifestly just; 
and he says truly — after noting that besides their 
passion for the redemption of Alsace is their con- 
viction that they "are struggling for the freedom 
of the smaller peoples" — that "without this cer- 
titude many of these Protestants would be tor- 
mented, paralysed, and made incapable of action". 
He quotes Pierre de Maupeou, killed on 28th 
May, 1915 : "So that at moments I may not fail 
in my duty, I must, indeed, be convinced of the 
beauty and of the righteousness of this cause". 
Another, Francis Monod : "War ! why, more than 
ever we seem to be struggling for peace. When 
the fictitious unity which was nearly established 



THE WITNESS OF FRANCE 111 

east of us forty-four years ago shall be dissolved, 
France, at the head of progress and liberty, shall 
aim effectively, then as always for the peace of 
the world." M. Barres gives many other ex- 
pressions of the faith and vision of those Protes- 
tant soldiers,^] 

I have read to you these utterances of believing 
Frenchmen, not only because they reveal the In- 
domitable idealism of their own people, but also 
because they express, as Frenchmen most frankly 
can, the high faith and conscience of the justice of 
our common cause, which equally inspire multi- 
tudes of the more reticent soldiers of the British 
Army. They speak not for themselves only, but 
for all the Allies in this war for the freedom and 
the peace of the world. It Is a wonderful con- 
cord of testimony. Frenchmen who had no creed, 
French Catholics, French Protestants, [and M. 
Barres quotes in addition the witness of French 
Jews, French Socialists, and those whom he calls 
Traditionalists^], ready before the war "to de- 
vour each other," are inspired to-day by the same 
moral aims, and in close and generous comrade- 
ship fight for their country as the champion of 

^ "The Faith of France," ch. iv. 
^ Chs. v., vi., vii. 



112 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

ideals on which the future of humanity depends. 
The war has yielded no more signal proof of the 
spiritual character of the forces which have 
roused and which bind the Allies in this awful 
Crisis. 

Yes, Americans, in the French we have com- 
rades splendidly worthy of the best efforts we can 
put forth in our warfare. God grant that we, 
on our part, may prove worthy of the French. 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE^ 

My Fellow Ministers, — Before I begin the 
subject on which I am to address you, it is fitting 
that I should read you some sentences from the 
Letter in which the Commission of the General 
Assembly of my Church has commended my pres- 
ent mission to the Churches and Christians of the 
United States. 

"At Edinburgh, the sixth day 
of March, in the year one 
thousand, nine hundred 
and eighteen. 
"This Commission of the General Assembly of 
the United Free Church of Scotland, understand- 
ing that the Very Reverend Sir George Adam 
Smith, D.D., LL.D., Principal of the University 
of Aberdeen, Ex-Moderator of the General As- 

^ An Address delivered at various Conferences of local 
Federations of Ministers of Christian Churches, and in 
parts given also at public meetings. 

"5 



116 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

sembly, has accepted an official invitation from 
America to address public gatherings on the moral 
aims of the war, and having learned that he is 
shortly to proceed to America on this mission, 
takes the opportunity of conveying through him to 
the Presbyterian Churches in America the frater- 
nal greetings of the United Free Church of Scot- 
land, and affectionately commends him to the 
ministers, office-bearers, and members of these 
Sister Churches across the seas. 

"It authorises him to express to these Churches 
and to the people of America the gratification 
which is felt throughout the United Free Church 
of Scotland at the resolution adopted by Congress 
a year ago, which led to America's entrance into 
the war, and its admiration of the response which 
the American nation has made to the call ad- 
dressed to it by its President. It recognises that 
President Wilson has interpreted the highest spirit 
of the American people, and that the adhesion of 
America to the Cause of the Allies has brought 
to them not merely an increase of material 
strength, but also a deeper sense of the sacredness 
of the moral and spiritual Issues that are at stake 
in the present conflict. Profoundly convinced that 
the high ideals of a nation draw their inspiration 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 117 

and support from the Gospel of Christ, this Com- 
mission desires Sir George Adam Smith to be its 
representative in assuring the Churches of Amer- 
ica of the value which it attaches to their co-opera- 
tion in the work of maintaining in their purity and 
in their strength the spiritual motives which have 
drawn the allied nations into this war, and in 
promising to the Delegation which the Presby- 
terian Church in the U.S.A. is sending to this 
country an enthusiastic welcome." 

In the middle of the war our General Assembly 
of 19 1 6 "gave thanks to God that the nation was 
sustained and united by a clear conviction of the 
righteousness of its cause," and expressed their 
confidence "that a policy so disinterested would be 
pursued to the end with unflinching resolution." 
In the spirit of that deliverance the Commission 
of the same Assembly exhorted the men of the 
Church to respond to His Majesty's call for fresh 
levies and "join the ranks of those who had al- 
ready given themselves to maintain the cause of 
righteousness." My Church thus expressed a 
double conviction — of the justice of the cause of 
the Allies, and of the duty of all Christians to 
support our Government in defending it by arms. 
The same double conviction was generally shared 



118 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

by all the other Churches of Great Britain. The 
response of their members was immediate and 
practically universal. An exact register of the 
sons of ministers of the Church of Scotland proved 
that at least 90 per cent, of those of them who 
were of military age had joined the colours before 
conscription came in. Similar figures were ob- 
tained for other Churches; and, had it been pos- 
sible to procure statistics for all our Christian 
homes, I believe that the results would not have 
been far short of the same. With few exceptions 
the Christians of Great Britain were, however 
reluctantly, convinced of their nation's and their 
own duty in this crisis and were resolute to carry 
that duty through. 

I say "however reluctantly," for like all other 
Christians we were devoted to peace. We hated 
war. We saw with dismay the disruption of 
Christendom. We remembered what our religion 
owed to Germany. Our missionaries were co- 
operating with German missionaries in various 
parts of the world. In recent recollection we had 
the world-conference on missions held in Edin- 
burgh, attended by many Germans, and the good 
hope it gave of a firmer alliance among the 
Churches of the nations. And not a few of us 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 119 

had grateful memories of German schools and 
teachers. 

Our desire for peace, and our honest efforts 
for many years to ensure it, had been shared, with 
few exceptions, by all the people of Great Britain. 
You know how unprepared my people were for a 
great war. That unpreparedness was part of the 
proof of the sincerity of the national will for 
peace. And when the crisis came our Government 
went to the utmost length — went the length of 
straining our relations with the nations friendly 
to us — in the effort to avert war. The Foreign 
Minister, Sir Edward Grey, proposed arbitration 
on the questions that had risen between Austria 
and Serbia, and all the Powers except one agreed 
to his proposals. That one was Germany, for 
even Austria — doubtless conscious of the moral 
weakness of her case against Serbia after the lat- 
ter's almost complete submission — seemed inclined 
to arbitration. Sir Edward Grey then asked the 
German Government to suggest some other plan. 
This also they refused to do. They had but one 
plan, long prepared for, and that was War, and 
they thought that the day for its execution had 
arrived. Had the diplomatic correspondence 
published soon after the outbreak of war left us 



120 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

in any doubt as to this, the doubt would have been 
dispelled by Prince Lichnowsky's Memorandum. 
That German testimony shows how earnestly and 
how honestly Sir Edward Grey had laboured for 
peace, and how Germany alone frustrated the 
achievement of a purpose accepted by every other 
people. Here are the German Prince's own 
words: "The impression became even stronger 
that we desired war in all circumstances. The 
more I pressed the less willing were they [the War 
Lords in Berlin] to alter their course." "Thus 
ended my London mission. It was wrecked not 
by the perfidy of the British but by the perfidy of 
our policy." "I had to support in London a 
policy which I knew to be fallacious. I was paid 
out for it, for it was a sin against the Holy Ghost." 
"We encouraged Count Berchtold to attack Ser- 
bia ... we rejected the British proposals of 
■ mediation ... we deliberately destroyed the 
possibility of a peaceful settlement. In view of 
these indisputable facts it is not surprising that 
the whole civilised world outside Germany at- 
tributed to us the sole guilt for the world-war." 
Such is the deliberate witness of the German Am- 
bassador to London, this Prussian nobleman, this 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 121 

friend of the Kaiser, this unwilling and alarmed 
agent of his policy. 

Thus were the Allies forced to war, some in 
self-defence, some, like Russia, to defend their 
allies or dependents, some, like Great Britain, to 
keep their sworn word to preserve the integrity of 
Belgium, but all alike in order to restore peace, in 
face of the most treacherous and criminal assault 
upon peace which was ever conceived by any nation 
or group of nations. That original conscience 
which drove us to jfight Germany, the instinct that 
we were battling for the peace of the world, and 
that this would be impossible till Germany was 
conquered by force of arms, has been confirmed 
and articulated by all that the successive stages of 
the war have exposed to us of her policy and 
methods. As your President has said: "The Ger- 
man power, a thing without conscience, honour, 
or capacity for covenanted peace, must be 
crushed." 

Both in your country and in mine there have 
been not a few who, though convinced of Ger- 
many's guilt, have declined to approve the deduc- 
tion that it was our duty to fight her; and some 
go so far as to aflirm that in no circumstance is it 
right to meet force by force; and that no Chris- 



122 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

tian ought to bear arms for any cause however 
just. I wish to examine these positions so far as 
they are held by Christian men on supposed re- 
ligious grounds. 

Their pacificism, it seems to me, rests upon a 
misreading of our Scriptures, and upon a confu- 
sion between merely political peace and the only 
peace which Christ promised or ensures to His 
people — ^the Inward spiritual peace which follows 
on reconciliation with God, on duty faithfully 
done, and on sacrifice patiently borne, If need be, 
to the uttermost. 

The truth is that In the New Testament as in 
the Old, Peace the Blessing is promised only as the 
result and reward of other things ; Peace the Duty 
has never a primary but always a secondary place. 
Righteousness comes first — justice, truth, purity, 
discipline, patience, and courage: the peaceable 
fruits of righteousness; the wisdom that is from 
above is first pure then peaceable; the work of 
righteousness shall be peace, and the efect of 
righteousness quietness and assurance for ever. 

Christ never promised political peace. Nor 
did He condemn all war between nations any more 
than He condemned the forcible execution of 
justice within the nation itself. It would be dif- 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 123 

ficult to believe that He who bade His disciple 
Render to Casar the things that are Casar's, by 
the payment of a just tax, would restrain His 
people from serving the State with their lives in 
defence of its freedom or at the call of interna- 
tional justice. In such circumstances the things 
of Casar and the things of God become the same 
things, and in serving the one we also serve the 
Other. To quote Christ's own example, as of 
Him who did no violence, is beside the argu- 
ment. To say to Christians — as is sometimes 
said — ^that they ought not to be soldiers, because 
it is impossible to conceive of their Master, if on 
earth to-day, as bearing arms, is just as true and 
just as irrelevant as to say that He would not have 
been a statesman, nor a judge, nor an active guar- 
dian of civic order — that He would not have 
acted as President of the United States, nor have 
sat in any of your courts of justice, nor served as 
a policeman on your streets^ — oiEces which, never- 
theless, though we have not His example, no one 
doubts that Christians may accept, and indeed 
ought not to refuse, if God have granted them 
the strength and talents for such vocations. Nay 
more, it is true that a war for justice for others 
and the redemption of the oppressed, may some- 



124 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

times offer the signal line along which Christians 
are called to obey both their Lord's Word and 
His Example by taking up their cross. Let me 
quote to you these sentences of a young Scottish 
thinker: "It needs no argument to prove that a 
soldier, using the weapons of his special calling, 
may dismiss all thought of his own inclination and 
safety as completely as the noblest of martyrs; 
while, on the other hand, methods outwardly 
peaceful or even sacred, may, in the rivalry of 
commerce or of ecclesiastical policy, be used with 
all the ruthlessness of the sword. . . . The final 
test is inward. Not outward force, but inward 
malice, is the unfailing mark of the natural order 
in its contest with the Spiritual."^ In this, as in 
everything. It is not the letter of the New Testa- 
ment but Its Spirit that must guide us. 

The foundation which Is In Christ Jesus Is truth 
and justice as well as love ; if on anything less than 
all these we strive to build peace, we are building 
on sand. To put peace before justice, before the 
redemption of the slave, before the deliverance 
of the tortured and the defence of women and 

^ G. F. Barbour, "A Philosophical Study of Christian 
Ethics," p. 374. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 
1911. 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 125 

children, Is to turn Christianity upside down. 
You remember the word of the Lord which came 
to the prophet Ezeklel when he lay prostrate un- 
der the sense of the awful preparations for judg- 
ment which were revealed to him, Son of man, 
stand on thy feet! On thy feet, not on they head ! 
It seems to me that our Christian pacifists are 
standing on their heads when they deny our duty 
to fight the cruelty and perfidy of the German 
power with the only weapons which that power 
understands — as you In America have proved by 
your two and a half years' peaceful experiments 
with It. They are standing on their heads. We may 
admire the gymnastic of the attitude, but we can- 
not ascribe it to either reason or moral strength. 
In their debate our pacifist friends sometimes 
throw the Old and New Testaments Into a false 
antithesis, as though the one were all for war and 
the other all for peace. What are the facts? 
The history of Israel Is the record of how a na- 
tion, under the guidance of God's Spirit and His 
chastisement of them, gradually rose above their 
primitive barbarity and lust of (Conquest, and 
nevertheless retained a conscience of their duty, 
when challenged, to witness for their faith and 
their freedom by force of arms. And you 



126 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

know how In loyalty to this conscience they rose 
against the Greek tyrant who sought to crush 
them into apostacy, who drove them from their 
land and ruined their temple; and how by the 
sword they beat him back, and not only regained 
their liberty to keep the law delivered by God to 
their fathers, but out of their martyrdom in war, 
out of the faithfulness of their sons, who fell for 
the Nation and the Faith on the battle-field, de- 
rived as their reward some of the strongest assur- 
ances of the resurrection and the life to come 
which are expressed in the Old Testament. But 
it is this very faithfulness under arms which the 
New Testament glorifies — praising the heroes, 
who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought 
righteousness, waxed valiant in fight, turned to 
flight the armies of the aliens, what time women 
received their dead raised to life again, and others 
not accepting deliverance obtained a better resur- 
rection. Of whom the world was not worthy!^ 

^ In the days of our Lord and His Apostles the present 
national conditions were not in being. When religious 
bodies or individuals in our midst deduce from the New 
Testament the principle that no Christian state should 
ever fight, even for freedom, faith, or justice to others, 
it must be pointed out to them that the New Testament 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 127 

Let me quote to you some utterances of great 
Christians upon this point. 

The first shall be one of John Calvin, very 
relevant to the present case which civilisation has 
against Germany: — 

"Since it makes no difference whether it is by 
a king or by the lowest of the people that a hostile 
and devastating inroad is made into a district over 
which they have no authority, all alike are to be 
regarded and punished as robbers. Natural 
equity and duty, therefore, demand that princes 
be armed not only to repress private crimes by 
judicial inflictions, but to defend the subjects com- 
mitted to their guardianship wherever they are 
hostilely assailed. Such even the Holy Spirit in 
many passages of Scripture declares to be lawful." 

Mr. Gladstone said: "The peace party has 
sprung prematurely to the conclusion that wars 
may be considered as having closed their melan- 
choly and miserable history. Such a view, though 
respectable and even noble, is a serious error. 
You cannot detest war too much. No war, ex- 
gives no direct teaching on the subject, for the problem 
was not present to its writers — no Christian state then 
existed. The indirect teaching of the New Testament 
has been dealt with above. 



128 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

cept that for liberty, does not contain elements of 
corruption as well as of misery. But however 
deplorable wars may be, there are times when 
justice, when faith, when the welfare of mankind 
require a man not to shrink from undertaking 
them." 

Or take this from Dale of Birmingham, very 
appropriate to our present warfare and its moral 
aims : — 

"I believe In peace — ^true peace — at any price; 
in peace even at the price of war. . . . Wrongs 
so flagrant may be committed by a despotic and 
irresponsible Government as not only to provoke 
the indignation of the civilised world, but to justify 
peremptory and forcible intervention. ... By 
all means let us try moral influence first [as you 
Americans have fully and patiently tried it], but 
while me maintain a large army and splendid navy 
to protect our own shores, I trust that we shall 
never shrink from using both on behalf of justice 
and freedom, wherever our national duty and 
our national honour require us to afford the good 
cause material as well as moral support." 

And I quote still another, both because he is a 
German, and because his words, though written 
more than fifty years ago, are singularly relevant 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 129 

to the position of the Allie« in the present crisis : — 
"The characteristic of a lawful war," says Har- 
less, in his "Christliche Ethik," "is that it is neces- 
sary in the interest of justice. Its justification is 
to be found in those international duties which 
flow from the special callings appointed by God 
to the several nations in their mutual relations, 
and the violation of which a regularly constituted 
association of nations has a right to avenge"^ 
The Italics are mine. Here we have already the 
idea of a League of Nations for the enforcement 
of justice and of peace. That is one of the ideals 
the Allies are fighting for. It has been accepted 
by their leading statesmen. Though the practical 
difficulties in the way of carrying it out are very 
great, we must keep in mind that to a certain ex- 
tent it has already been realised by the league of 
the Allies in this war, inspired by a common con- 
science for moral ends in the highest interests of 
all mankind; and, as essential to these ends, united 
in an endeavour to beat down the most terrible 
assault ever delivered on the freedom and justice 
of the world. In whatever form "the League of 

^Quoted by Luthardt, "Moral Truths of Christian- 
ity," English Translation, p. 368. Edinburgh: T. & T. 
Clark, 1873. 



130 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

Nations" may be possible or desirable, this Is 
certain, that it can be realised only through the 
defeat of Germany and in her disillusionment of 
the false Ideals which have driven her to war. 

During these four years of war we British have 
indeed appreciated — by contrast — the Infinite 
blessings of political peace. Not a day has passed 
without yielding its tragic motives for praying and 
for labouring towards such a peace. If only it may 
be secured without cost to conscience and to duty. 
But never was a people granted so full an oppor- 
tunity, as God has granted us, of distinguishing 
between the peace that is false and the peace that 
is true. We narrowly escaped the one ; we have 
had rich experience of the other. 

We might have had peace as the world calls 
it. Germans, Insulting our honour, sought to 
bribe us into a neutrality which would have be- 
trayed our friends of France, and left Belgium 
in the lurch. Yes, we might have had peace. 
But It would have been peace without righteous- 
ness — peace with a bad conscience — peace with 
shame as we knew ourselves unfaithful to weaker 
but gallant peoples who trusted our -yord for the 
security of their national existence ; peace with re- 
morse as we saw them deprived of their freedom, 



PEACE— FALSE AND TRUE 131 

and our allies, taking the field without us, crushed 
by a ruthless and remorseless foe; peace with 
dishonour as we proved faithless to our fathers' 
traditions of liberty and justice, and found that we 
had betrayed those national interests and free in- 
stitutions with the charge of which Providence 
has entrusted us throughout our vast Empire; 
and peace with fear, when we came to realise, as 
in neutrality we should assuredly have done, that 
without allies or friends, we must meet, in our 
turn, the onset of the hatred and ambition of ar- 
rogant and pitiless victors. 

On the other hand, what has God given us since 
we went to war and, we may say, just because we 
went to war as our signal and inevitable duty? A 
peace unprecedented throughout our kingdom and 
Empire. A unity and co-operation that have 
never been matched among us — not perfect, I 
admit, but surpassing all our expectations and 
deserts. Party strife and faction have been hushed 
almost entirely. Class and race passion have been 
greatly reduced. It is, I repeat, a national and 
imperial unity far above what we or any other 
Empire ever experienced. But deeper still there 
has been the tranquillity of heart, reserved for all 
who devote themselves to moral, unselfish ideals, 



132 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

and who have resolved, come what may, to do 
their duty by God and their fellow-men. Such a 
peace, the surest source of courage, we have seen 
in our statesmen, and in all who bear the chief and 
most agonising responsibilities of the war. Such 
a peace has filled the hearts of our sons who have 
so magnificently faced death for God's sake and 
their country's. And such a peace — as I can 
testify from personal experience — fills the homes 
which have given of their dearest to the war and 
may never see them return. In all the bereaved 
families which I have visited, or corresponded 
with, I have with one (perhaps two) exceptions 
found no complaining or resentment, far less any 
dismay or despair. They had yielded their best 
to the cause of righteousness, and in humble 
patience and faith they rested sure of reunion with 
their dear ones in God's own time. In retreat 
as in advance, in defeat as in victory. Great Brit- 
ain has found the peace of God — tested, where 
Christ said it was to be tested, in great tribula- 
tions and found unfailing. 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 



VI 

THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR* 

Mr. President, Members of the University of 
Chicago, Graduates , and Graduands : — 

It has been my privilege and honour to teach 
in this University under both of your great Presi- 
dents. I wish it were once more in order to teach 
that I had come among you on this occasion. But 
neither my present office in a sister-University nor 
the cruel circumstances of our times permit of 
that. I am honoured to come here as Principal 
and Vice-Chancellor of a sister-University, and 
with all the validity of that office I convey to you 
her greetings, to which (by the commission of the 
Principals of the other three Scottish Universities, 

^ Delivered on the occasion of the One Hundred and 
Seventh Convocation of the University of Chicago, held 
in Hutchinson Court, nth June, 191 8, under President 
Harrj' Pratt Judson. James Vincent Nash, A.B., 19 14, 
courteously made this stenographic record. 

135 



136 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

I am empowered to add their greetings as well — 
St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. 

We congratulate you on your rapid progress, 
on the solid foundations on which you are built, 
and upon the hope, the ambitions, the prospects 
which you have in your short history already so 
worthily earned. 

Coming back to you as Principal of Aberdeen, 
I am, first of all, of course, impressed by our dif- 
ferences, the differences between our two Uni- 
versities, and these in many directions. I come 
to your Western World from the most northerly 
University of the British Empire, and almost the 
farthest north University in the whole world. 

That may suggest to you something Arctic, and 
indeed in Scotland we live in the latitude of 
Labrador, but thanks to the heating system which 
your great continent works for us in the Gulf of 
Mexico we enjoy a more equable climate than 
your own, suffering neither of your great ex- 
tremes. In fact, the summer of the east of Scot- 
land is pretty much like the spring of New Eng- 
land, and I know no better climate to do one's 
best work in. 

There are two other differences between us. 
One, of course, of age. We are just about 400 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 137 

years older than you, having been founded in the 
year 1494, by Papal bull, by a Pope whom I 
hardly dare name in this gathering, Alexander VI, 
Alexander Borgia, notorious for his crimes; and 
I believe that this foundation of my University 
was the one good act which he was ever known 
to have performed. 

The other difference is that, of course, of wealth 
and size. And I confess that on this visit to 
America, which has Included visits to many of 
your great Universities, I have never entered one, 
and I have not entered this, without breaking 
anew the tenth commandment. 

I congratulate you on your wealth, on the lavish- 
ness of your space, and the greatness and the 
beauty of your buildings. I congratulate and 
envy you. 

But there is this to be said of us : The Scottish 
Universities have always been thoroughly demo- 
cratic. Through our system of parish schools, 
and now of numerous higher grade and secondary 
schools, we in Scotland have always provided a 
ladder to the learned professions, reaching from 
the steps of the poorest cottage and croft in our 
land. 

The students of my own University are gath- 



138 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

ered from every class of the people, and during 
the last few years some of the chief places in our 
entrance bursary competition have been taken by 
the sons or daughters of working men, one among 
them being, I remember, the son of the widow 
of a railway porter. 

Before I begin the special subject on which 
I have been asked to address you there are two 
preliminary points on which I wish to say a word 
or two. First of all, I want to remind you of 
the continuity of University development in Great 
Britain and America. Have you ever considered 
the close succession of your own Universities to 
our earlier institutions of learning in Great Brit- 
ain? The last three of our ancient Universities 
— Edinburgh, Trinity College, Dublin, and Mari- 
schal College, Aberdeen, with the full rights of a 
University — were founded In 1583, 1591, and 
I593> respectively, and no other British University 
was founded between that last date at the close 
of the sixteenth century, and the foundation of 
London University In 1826 and of Durham In 
1832. 

But that great gap of more than two centuries 
was amply and generously filled by the glorious 
succession of American Universities. Harvard, 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 139 

your oldest University, founded In 1636, is only 
forty-three years younger than the last of our 
ancient Universities; William and Mary followed 
in 1693, Yale In 1701, and between that date and 
the founding of London University there ap- 
peared Pennsylvania, Princeton, Brown, Colum- 
bia, Dartmouth, Rutgers, Amherst, and I don't 
know how many others. You gloriously, as I say, 
filled that great gap of ours, and it has always 
been a proof to me, sir, that the Pilgrim Fathers, 
and other English, Scottish, and Irish emigrants 
who laid the foundations of the United States, 
carried away not only a great part of the soul and 
character of Great Britain but a very large por- 
tion of her brains as well. 

The other point on which I wish to touch is 
this : The time has long been due for a closer co- 
operation between the Universities of America and 
those of Great Britain, and for some measure of 
co-ordination between their degrees. Always de- 
sirable, such measures have at last become urgent 
in the circumstances created by the present war. 
They are rendered immediately necessary by the 
closing of German Universities, for a very long 
time we must expect, to British and American stu- 
dents ; and, to say the least, it is up to us people of 



140 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

America, of France, and of Great Britain to show 
that in this respect the German Universities are 
not indispensable to us. 

These measures are rendered all the easier by 
the new alliance, and I trust the lasting alliance, 
between our peoples. The times are both favour- 
able and most compelling for their realisation. 
Practical steps will be taken to this end in the 
course of the year. A conference on the subject, 
between delegates from Britain and representa- 
tives of your Universities, was called for May In 
New York, but has been postponed till October 
or November; and I trust that conclusions will 
then be reached which may commend themselves 
to the Universities on both sides of the Atlantic. 
The special problems with which that conference 
will have to deal are, first, the interchange of 
teachers, and, secondly, opportunities for post- 
graduate studies. 

As to the first, your experience with Germany 
and France will be of great value to us of Britain 
In this respect, especially with regard to the length 
of the period, and to the character, of the lectures 
to be given by the visiting professors — whether 
they are to be short, supplementary courses, or 
longer courses fitted into the regular curriculum of 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 141 

the Universities visited, and qualifying for their 
degrees. 

With regard to the second point, opportunities 
for postgraduate studies, the chief problem that 
lies before us is the provision of suitable degrees 
in recognition of postgraduate work. I emphasise 
this as postgraduate work, for I think it would be 
detrimental to the national interests of any of 
our three peoples If It sent its undergraduates out 
of their own country. It is during undergraduate 
years that the national spirit and the capacities for 
proving proper citizens of one of the great nations 
ripen and are most developed and most easily 
trained, and I would deprecate, from our experi- 
ence of the presence of Indian students in Great 
Britain during their undergraduate years, the ex- 
change among us of undergraduate students. 

But we all want to see the postgraduate stu- 
dents of all three peoples taking advantage of the 
opportunities of research and the fresh aspects 
of teaching which are possible to them, by passing 
from one set of our national Universities to the 
other. 

Now, on all these points I offer no further 
opinion. At present it is enough to assure you, 
and I do so heartily, that in the British Uni- 



142 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

versities to-day there exists a very strong desire 
for an effective collaboration with the Universities 
of France and the Universities of the United 
States. The various Universities in my country 
are applying their minds, and have been applying 
them for some time, to the discussion of details; 
and I ought to warn you of the appearance al- 
ready of a considerable variety of opinion. 

I now come to my proper tale this afternoon, 
"The Universities and the War." I asked 
President Judson to make the title general, be- 
cause I want before I close to say something about 
the Universities of France and their contribution 
to the war as well as about that of those of my 
own country. 

I believe that no institutions of modern society, 
not even the churches, have been more powerfully 
affected by the war than the Universities of all the 
belligerent countries. They have contributed, 
among the Allies, to the understanding of the 
great issues; they have swelled, more than most 
institutions and I believe in a degree equal to the 
churches, the volume of that national conscience 
which is our chief and our lasting power in fighting 
for a cause so just and so sacred. Above all, they 
have sent lavishly of their men, both teachers and 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 143 

taught, both students and graduates, to the forces 
of the Allies; and they have contributed, in full 
proportion to their number, to the colossal sacri- 
fices which the manhood of their nations has made 
to the most sacred cause ever fought for in the 
whole range of human history. 

We have had in Britain, not a perfect, but a 
very considerable organisation for public educa- 
tion in the meaning of the war, both morally and 
politically; and naturally the staffs of our Uni- 
versities have been called upon to contribute to 
this propaganda, as well as to the great campaign 
so successfully conducted from one end of my land 
to the other, in the interests of recruiting, while 
the volunteer system of enlistment still prevailed 
among us. 

Now, I need hardly say to you who have al- 
ready, In your year of warfare, done so much in 
this direction, that our laboratories and their 
staffs have been occupied in the researches and 
manufactures connected with munitions and ord- 
nance, with the prevention of disease among the 
troops, with the development and economy of 
food supplies, with the supply of new fertilisers, 
with assisting new or revived Industries, many of 
which had been virtually monopolised by the Ger- 



144 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

man people; In researches leading to the manu- 
facture of glass, textile fabrics, army cloths, aero- 
plane fabrics, dyestuffs and drugs, of the last of 
which we had In our country, owing to the lack of 
foresight, a very Inadequate supply. 

Some University buildings have been turned, as 
with you, into hospitals, others into training 
schools, others Into barracks for cadets. Others 
have become workrooms for volunteer service in 
the production of war dressings and hospital gar- 
ments. 

Time does not permit me to furnish you with 
details under each of these heads, but I may say, 
by way of illustration of the last, that In Aberdeen 
University, in eighteen months, our University 
Women's War Work Association completed 15,- 
400 hospital dressings and comforts and over 
257,000 war dressings for military and Red Cross 
hospitals and ambulances. I haven't the figures 
for the last year, but I confidently believe that by 
this time the figures I have given you have been 
doubled. 

The engineering departments in several Uni- 
versities have been handed over to the Admiralty 
or the Ministry of Munitions for steel testing and 
other purposes. In other departments assistance 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 145 

has been given to His Majesty's forces in meteor- 
ology and other sciences connected with aviation, 
in methods for detecting submarines, and mat- 
ters connected with transport and embarkation, 
and countless other purposes of the war. And all 
this in addition to the fact that, though our num- 
bers have been reduced, and some of our courses 
shortened, and a large proportion of our staffs 
are absent on whole-time service for the war, the 
regular work of the Universities has been gen- 
erally sustained from first to last through the four 
years of our strenuous and bitter fighting. 

I may say again, just as a point in illustration, 
that out of the hundred or so members of the 
teaching staff of my own University no fewer than 
thirty-one are giving whole-time service either to 
the Army or to the Navy, while about twenty or 
thirty others are giving half-time service — half 
to the University and half for war purposes. 

I come now to the numbers of our men stu- 
dents and graduates who have enlisted or been 
commissioned for direct war service. Generally 
speaking, I may say that while the volunteer sys- 
tem of service prevailed the students of our Uni- 
versities were reduced in most cases to one-third 
of their former number, in many cases to one- 



146 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

fourth, nearly so in Aberdeen, but in Oxford and 
Cambridge I believe to nearly one-tenth of their 
former number. That was, of course, because 
Oxford and Cambridge receive students at a 
higher age, nearer the military age, than the rest 
of us do. 

The response of University graduates within 
military age was practically as full as that of our 
students. In Aberdeen, for instance, we have a 
list of graduates, men and women, of over 5000, 
all told. On the fifteenth of February, this year, 
1750 of these were on naval or military service — 
practically every man who was of military age 
and could be spared from the practice of his civil 
profession. 

Among them all, it may be of interest to you to 
know that I have found only four ultra-pacifists 
and conscientious objectors. 

Taking graduates and undergraduates to- 
gether, by the beginning of 19 17, when almost all 
who served were still volunteers, the following are 
the most notable of the numbers contributed by 
the Universities: Oxford by that time had sent 
10,688 men to the colours; Cambridge had sent 
13,128 ; London University had sent over 20,000. 

Take, again, the four Scottish Universities: 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 147 

Edinburgh — and these numbers are correct up to 
the middle of February last, a somewhat later 
date — had sent something over 5000; Glasgow, 
3222; Aberdeen, 2645; and St. Andrews, 742. 

I come now to the gravest part of my story — 
the tale of the sacrifices of the Universities for 
our common cause, the number of their members 
who have been killed in action, who have died of 
wounds or disease, or who have gone down with 
their ships. At the beginning of 19 17 Oxford 
had lost 141 2 of its men, and I expect by this 
time that the number is over 2000; Cambridge 
had lost 1405. At the beginning of this year the 
fallen of Glasgow University were 472; of Edin- 
burgh, nearly 450; of my own University, nearly 
250; and of St. Andrews, 86, making for the 
Scottish Universities a total of over 1250 out of 
11,000 of their men on service, not all of whom 
had reached the front. 

Now, I wish to tell you, as I can from my ex- 
perience as Principal of Aberdeen University, 
who have been privileged to enter by correspond- 
ence or sometimes in person, over 200 of the 
families of those nearly 250 of our fallen, that 
except in one or two cases I never found any mur- 
muring; far less despair or dismay or resent- 



148 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

merit towards God at the great sacrifices which 
they had been called to pay, but, on the contrary, 
everywhere a resignation to it and pride in the 
fact that their sons had been called to fight and 
to suffer for the sacred Cause, as they believed, 
of their country and their God; and, in the power 
of that, everywhere a humble hope of reunion with 
those whose deaths in such a faith, for such a 
Cause, they could not but regard as entrances 
upon a higher and a nobler service above. 

I want to devote, for I feel we have a great 
debt in the matter, a few words, before I sit 
down, to the University of France. I shall best 
bring this before you by reminding you that before 
this Great War broke out there was no people, no 
civilised people, on the face of the earth so broken, 
split, and fissured as the people of France; split 
from top to bottom by the greatest of all schisms, 
the religious; and broken, more than any other 
political unity in the world, into groups, parties, 
and factions. 

What do we now see? What did we see be- 
fore two years of the war were over but that split 
and fissured people united again and as compact 
and as concentrated upon the moral issues and 
aims of this war as either the British people or 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 149 

now the people of the United States. What had 
worked this miracle? The Rector of the Acad- 
emy of Bordeaux tells us what it was that worked 
the miracle. In his interesting book, "L'Univer- 
site et la Guerre," he shows that it was not merely 
the physical pressure of self-defence, but, on the 
contrary, a common devotion which bound all 
parties, communions, factions, and sects alike in 
dedication to the spiritual ideals which the war 
revealed. 

• ••••••• 

[Here followed a summary of what I have 
given in the address on "The Witness of France," 
now No. IV in this volume.] 

Now, I have delayed you too long, but I want 
to close (being a minister and unable to help it) 
with a practical application. And for this purpose 
I must go back to what I told you of the awful toll 
of our sacrifices. As I said the other day in this 
University, I come to you from a people that have 
drunk to the dregs the cup of the agony of war 
for the last four years. But whatever the destruc- 
tion, whatever the sufferings, whatever the sacri- 
fices we have endured these four years, my mes- 
sage from my people to the American people is 
that that conscience with which we began the war 



150 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

Is as strong as ever it was ; our faith in the justice 
of our Cause and our determination to see it, 
with our Allies, through to its inevitable victory, 
have not failed us and will not fail us. 

We who are older, and some of us much older, 
than those who have fallen in their thousands and 
tens of thousands, in my country and in France — 
for remember the worst of war is that it falls 
most heavily on the younger men — recognise the 
debt of our age to the youth of our nation, and 
feel an added duty toward their ideals. To the 
inspiration we have drawn from their courage 
as individuals we are trying to add this care — 
that the visions and the enthusiasms of our sons 
do not suffer from this desperate thinning of their 
ranks across the whole of Europe ; that more than 
ever we control the accumulating prejudice of 
our years, our growing contentment with things 
as they are; that we husband such force and fresh- 
ness as remain to ourselves and continue, along- 
side the young men who may be left to us, to play 
our diminishing part with unabated zest and 
courage. 

But on you, my younger friends, who are the 
contemporaries of those young martyrs who have 
fallen in their tens of thousands in Europe and to 



THE UNIVERSITIES AND THE WAR 151 

whose great army your youth have begun to add 
(God grant it may not be so great a number, but 
it sometimes looks like it) — on you, who are 
either their contemporaries or just behind them, 
there has fallen an obligation heavier than per- 
haps was ever felt by any generation of youth in 
all the history of your people. 

In those whom it is most natural for you to 
follow you have a wealth of example that should 
control and inspire you throughout your lives. 
See that you cherish to the end the value of 
spiritual ideals, both for man and for nation, and 
without flinching face the full cost of your duty 
to such ideals, in life and In death, in ways that 
may show no heroism, but need no less virtue and 
toil. See that you practise that faithfulness in 
service, and in sacrifice to which those heroes have 
risen. Accept discipline as patiently as they did. 
Accept discipline — that Is the foundation of all 
heroism, of all really good service to our fellow- 
men, and the first condition of a noble sacrifice. 
Be careful for details In the routine of your life, 
but be equally ready for life's emergencies. Never 
grudge the call to extra work nor shrink from any 
danger that may spring upon your way to It. Ever 
keep back from uttering any selfish remonstrance 



152 OUa COMMON CONSCIENCE 

at the inequalities of reward or fortune, some- 
times as great in peace as they are startlingly so in 
time of war. If you thus train yourself in the 
work of ordinary days and in answer to God's 
more urgent calls, you shall be able to make the 
last resignation of life itself in humble hope and 
peace. 

Friends, disasters may await us as peoples and 
as armies; troubles, sacrifices, and suffering 
greater than any we have yet experienced may fall 
upon us. Let us remember those who have suf- 
fered, who have fought, and who have died for 
us, and rekindle the flickering flame of our cour- 
age at the imperishable fire of their devotion. 



SOME RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE 
WAR 



yii 

SOME RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE 
WARi 

I HAVE been asked to speak on the Religious 
Effects of the War. I do so with great hesitation, 
because my experience is limited, because there is 
much contradiction in the testimony of those 
whose knowledge is both wider and more intimate 
than my own, and because it will not be possible 
for anyone to form a just estimate of the religious 
effects of the war, till our soldiers have returned 
to civil life and till, indeed, we see how our whole 
people bear themselves when these calamities have 
overpassed. At least, keep in mind that what I 
say is but the saying of one man; and that one 
man, however wide his experience, cannot speak 
in matters of religion for a whole nation. 

^ This Address was delivered in various forms to sev- 
eral meetings of local Federations of Ministers, Min- 
isters' Clubs and gatherings of Churchmen and Church- 
women in different parts of the United States. 

155 



166 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 



In other addresses I have alluded to the general 
effect on Christian faith of the outbreak of the 
war, with all that it threatened from the first.^ 
I go into that more fully now. 

The outbreak of such a war could not but 
shock the faith of many Christians. Not only 
did it rend Christendom asunder, and seem to 
spell the failure of religious forces which had been 
at work in Europe for nineteen centuries; but in 
the professed motives of those who were alone 
responsible for starting it, and in their measures 
for its conduct, the war exposed a moral reckless- 
ness and malignity more awful than faith had ever 
encountered. Germans proclaimed Might as 
Right, they exalted the State as superior to moral- 
ity, they enforced the duty of a strong state to 
develop its strength by war, if necessary, but in 
any case irrespective of the rights of weaker states ; 
and they not only announced a policy of "fright- 
fulness" but they have carried this out in a train 
of atrocities on sea and land, more dreadful — 
because applied with all the resources of modem 
^See above, pp. 43-45, no, 118. 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 157 

science — than, the world had ever seen. The 
minds of men staggered before this conspiracy of 
brute force and remorseless intellect against the 
common moralities, and trembled at the possibility 
of its triumph. In such a crisis, in face of the 
awful purposes and powers of evil exposed by 
Germany's assault on law and liberty as a whole, 
mere talk about the failure of the churches seemed 
small and irrelevant. There was just as little use 
in lamenting the frustration of the recent efforts 
of statesmen (partly inspired by the churches) 
to submit all international quarrels to arbitration.^ 
Things greater and more fundamental were at 
stake. The sovereignty of God Himself was chal- 
lenged. The moral universe seemed shaken to 
its basis. And something nearer home than the 
crimes of our enemies startled us. We were 
haunted by a deep sense of our own unfitness for 
such a crisis. Were we worthy to have faith 
at all? 

^ The origins and progress of the war also proved the 
futility of the easy arguments, based on purely material 
grounds, that war was becoming a less possible event and 
if started could not endure beyond a few months, because 
of the terrible costs and sacrifices involved by the modern 
scientific conduct of it. 



158 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

What was it that rallied us? 

You remember that scene in the Temple, when 
the prophet suddenly felt his vision of the Near- 
ness and the Majesty of God blotted out; when 
the House filled with smoke, the thresholds were 
moved and there came upon him the sense of his 
own and his people's sin; yet at that moment the 
seraph flew with a live coal from the Altar to his 
lips, a mission was proclaimed, and he sprang at 
once to fulfil it. So, in part at least, was it with 
us four years ago. The smoke of war swept 
between our hearts and the throne of God, our 
world shook around us, and nothing articulate 
seemed left save a sense of our guilty weakness. 
Yet through all that darkness and confusion im- 
mediate duty flashed, clear, firm and inevitable. 
The conscience of our people — ^the conscience not 
of this nor that great man nor of a few, but of our 
people and of our race, vocal to the farthest 
bounds of the world without need of prophet or 
interpreter — answered, as with the lips of one 
man, to what we felt to be the call of God. 

I have qualified the analogy I have drawn; 
because you will ask, where with us was the assur- 
ance which came to the prophet that his and his 
people's iniquity was taken away and their sin 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 159 

purged? My answer is, that, though the gospel 
of forgiveness may not have been articulated to 
our minds as It was to the prophet's, a strong 
measure of the moral force of forgiveness came 
upon us In the very fact of so signal a call to duty. 
In the Divine forgiveness there Is nothing more 
cleansing, nothing more uplifting than the assur- 
ance It brings, that God trusts us once again, In 
spite of ourselves and of our past, with duty and 
service In His Kingdom. Such a trust took pos- 
session of us. Unworthy and unprepared, we 
were called to defend the right, to succour the 
oppressed, to battle for justice and freedom; and 
our Immediate Instincts of this became dally more 
clear through our further discoveries of the alms 
and conduct of our foes. This conscience of a 
trust has been with us all along. Our statesmen 
have defined its fulfilment as our main and prin- 
cipal aim in fighting; our self-defence and the 
security of our empire being only the necessary 
means for fulfilling it. 

Thus, as so often in the experience of men, 
faith, confused and stunned, was rallied first of all 
upon conscience and the clear call of duty. 



160 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 



Time brought us, or at least some of us, these 
further reflections. When people asked, as cer- 
tain kept asking, did not such a war mean the 
destruction of faith, "the collapse of Christianity" 
as their panic phrased it, we remembered that 
man's trust in the Most High had passed through 
trials as fiery as this, even some in which the 
powers of righteousness seemed for the time com- 
pletely overwhelmed; yet these trials proved not 
fatal to faith but corrective and the discipline to a 
more thorough theology. Above all we remem- 
bered that it was in periods not only of war, but 
of wars closely resembling the present in their 
conditions and Issues, that the Hebrew prophets 
both laid the foundations on which our faith still 
rests, and descried, though far off, the full out- 
lines of Its promise and assurance. When Assyria 
and Babylon successively sought the conquest of 
the world In a spirit like that of Germany to-day; 
when, boasting their superior culture, they claimed 
the right to Impose It by force of arms on other 
peoples; when they denied the claims of the 
smaller nations to a separate existence ; when they 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 161 

marched their armies forth, as the Kaiser marched 
his, in the name of a sheerly national god; when 
they avowed a policy of "frightfulness," and car- 
ried this out with massacres and deportations of 
civilians, as Germany has done,^ and when they 
achieved their ends and did conquer the world — 
it was even then (as we remembered) that the 
profoundest thoughts of God's nature and will 
were formed in His prophets' minds, and the 
widest visions of His Providence opened to their 
eyes. It was amid such experiences that they 
laid down those truths of the Sovereignty of God, 
of His Righteousness and inevitable Law, of His 

^ A study of the works of the younger Delitzsch, 
Winckler, and other German Assyriologists reveals many 
resemblances between the modern German spirit and the 
spirit of Assyria and Babylon, which they have done so 
much to interpret to their people. There are the same 
confidence in sheer magnitude and incapacity to appre- 
ciate spiritual values, the same beliefs that small peoples 
have no inherent powers of culture, and that everything 
worthy in the history of man is the offspring only of 
the immemorially trained and organised intellect of some 
great world-power; the same symptoms of megalomania 
— the tendency to overlook or distort facts and the want 
of humour. These observations are not the result of the 
war. I published them in January, 1907. 



162 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

equal regard for all the nations of mankind, and 
of history as the tribunal of His Justice, on which 
truths our faith still rests as its deepest founda- 
tions. And we told ourselves that the recurrence 
of experiences, out of which had been born the 
strongest faith men have found, surely could not 
be fatal to faith now; that, as Israel had, we 
might find in it not the overthrow but the dis- 
cipline and enlargement of our faith. 

I think that on the whole this has proved to 
be the case. The war indeed has been fatal to 
many forms of faith, partial, facile and selfish 
forms, and for that we can only be thankful. But 
we have felt it — I know I speak for many — to 
correct, purify, widen and re-establish our knowl- 
edge of God, and that in several directions. 

I have spoken of partial and selfish forms of 
faith. In the softness of mind bred by our com- 
fortable civilisation, we religious people had 
grown to be content with easy views of God as 
a God of Love and Peace and not of Truth and 
Law as well, the foundations of Whose throne 
are justice and judgment; Who spared not His 
own Son against the evil of the world; and Who, 
even, when He pardons and trusts them once more 
with His Service, exacts both from nations and 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 163 

individuals the consequences not only of their 
presumptuous sins, but of all their slackness, in- 
dolence, and neglect of His laws, whether in the 
natural or in the moral sphere. Accepting Christ 
as our Priest we had failed to follow Him as our 
Prophet and our King; we had selfishly tended 
to use Him as our Peace without obeying Him as 
our Conscience. We had rested in the comfort of 
our Lord's teaching, and had forgotten its rigours. 
Or we had been satisfied with being warned off 
the grosser vices; and had ignored, how, for in- 
stance in His Parables, our Lord's judgments are 
less frequent against sins of passion and excess 
than against sins of neglect and indolence — want 
of watching, leaving talents to rust, unfaithfulness 
in little things, lack of foresight and prudence — all 
the sins of the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, with 
easy thoughts of God and cheap views of our 
fellow-men. 

Now the war has at least brought us back to all 
this, has exposed our partial thinking about God, 
our grudging measures of each other, our indif- 
ference and guilty inefficiency — ^the unthorough- 
ness both of our faith and of our service — and has 
reminded us of how offensive these are and cer- 
tain of the Divine judgments. If with any it has 



164 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

failed to do so, they have missed the power we 
shall all need for the even greater problems and 
tasks which await us in the re-organisation of our 
life when the war is over. 



Objections have been raised to the many calls to 
Repent, which the Churches have addressed 
throughout the war to themselves and the Nation. 
But these objections are due to ignorance of what 
Repentance means. Repentance is of an infinite 
fertility in life. History testifies to its indis- 
pensableness in liberating the finest energies of 
our nature. Even Gibbon acknowledges the sin- 
cere and powerful impulse which the early Church 
gave to human progress by awakening this primal 
ethical passion among men. Repentance is the 
womb of forces both moral and intellectual, as its 
New Testament name implies. It brings a clearer 
and a further vision; it disposes to sympathy and 
therefore leads to a juster knowledge of our fel- 
low-men ; in these days of war it is well to remind 
ourselves that it makes us readier to forgive our 
enemies by discovering how much we share the 
guilty tempers we abhor in them. It cleanses the 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 165 

mind to an increase of the mind's capacity and 
grip; and while it enfranchises, at the same time 
it concentrates, the will, under the grateful 
urgency of a heavy debt both to God and man. 
As St. Paul said to the Corinthians : what earnest 
care it wrought in you, yea what clearing of your- 
selves, yea what fear, yea what longing, yea what 
zeal, yea what avenging! Repentance is not a 
passion only. It is an energy and the liberator 
of energies: the redeemer, in the first place, of 
conscience, and that works both ways (as with 
the Corinthians), for besides producing In men 
conviction of their own sins, it gives them a firmer 
sense of any justice which may be inherent In their 
cause — what clearing of yourselves — and there- 
fore courage to stand upon it, and strength to op- 
pose the wrong. So repentance begets an energy 
and enthusiasm of service, and even of righteous 
war — yea what zeal, yea what avenging! 

All this is true not only of individuals but of 
nations. Our Puritan fathers, in time of war 
or other calamity, like the Prophets, always called 
to a national repentance; and in times of peace 
men like Wilberforce, Chalmers, and Shaftesbury 
in my country have done the same in preparation 
for the reforms they led. But it has not only been 



166 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the evangelicals who have roused this primal 
passion of morality. I have mentioned Gibbon's 
testimony to its worth. Take also Edmund Burke. 
He does not use the word repentance, but the 
shame which he bends his eloquence to stir in his 
people for their political and social sins, is of the 
same ethical quality. 

The war has roused us to our need of this 
repentance. I do not say our whole people, for 
as history shows a national repentance is always 
more or less vicarious, but all our spiritual and 
earnest minds. Whatever their other failings, 
our Churches have at least been true to this first 
demand of their Lord, and have not only pro- 
claimed it, but, for themselves and with many 
beyond their membership, have fulfilled it. And 
first for our national sins of commission — the 
selfishness of our classes and their interests, our 
factiousness, the obstinacy of our prejudices and 
disposition to quarrel over lesser things to the 
sacrifice of the greater and more urgent, our love 
of money, greed and wide intemperance; as well 
as, in particular, the tolerance shown even by 
religious people to unworthy tendencies in art and 
journalism — our criminal transgression of the 
apostolic warning, not to be partakers of other 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 167 

men's sins. But still more has the war exposed 
to us our need to repent of the partial and selfish 
faith of which I have spoken, of the carelessness 
and waste in our public and private l-ife, of sloven- 
liness in thinking as well as in doing, of our 
notorious contempt of discipline, both physical 
and moral, of our want of watching and unfaith- 
fulness in the little trusts of life. 



In another address^ I have spoken of the serv- 
ice of the War in clearing up our thoughts about 
Peace. It has proved to us the constant teaching 
of the Bible, that Peace is no primary blessing or 
duty which can be sought or achieved in disregard 
to other duties, or may be preferred before them; 
but is always and only the fruit of truth, justice 
and the conquest of evil, which are precedent and 
necessary to it, and must be striven for, at what- 
ever cost, if peace is to be clean and enduring. 
The war has bitterly taught us to distinguish be- 
tween merely political peace, with its inestimable 
benefits, and the inward peace promised by Christ 
to the doing of God's will, a good conscience, the 

^ V. Peace — False and True. 



168 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

brave acceptance of duty, and sacrifice nobly 
borne — the peace which not only endures in spite 
of war but may find in war its temporary yet in- 
evitable instrument. 

By this and other ways the war has brought us 
very near the Cross, and renewed those supreme 
lessons of life of which the Cross is the eternal 
symbol. We had been forgetting that the end of 
sin is tragedy and death. We had been forget- 
ting that all the evils which sin breeds require for 
their overthrow the uttermost men can give, that 
they are to be defeated only by the sacrifice of 
what we hold dearest, even life itself— that there 
are powers and purposes of evil which can be en- 
countered in no other way than by resistance unto 
blood. This war has brought us again face to 
face with the stern facts. 

The truth that such sacrifice is mainly vicarious, 
the suffering by men for sins not their own, and 
for the peace and freedom of others than them- 
selves, has also been brought home to our hearts 
with the keenest pangs that men and women can 
feel. But that truth is no more than what runs 
through all the history of the human family on 
earth, and finds its most signal proof in the Cross 
of Christ. The moral value and influence of 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 169 

sacrifice lie in its vicariousness. That this quality 
and this moral effect, of what they do and suffer, 
have been present to multitudes of our young 
soldiers and have inspired them, we have abundant 
proof. In another address^ I have quoted the 
avowals of this truth by a number of Frenchmen 
on the fighting front. And these speak not for 
themselves only but for hosts of our more reticent 
British martyrs. What has sustained and stimu- 
lated them in a warfare they detest, has been 
the thought that they fought and died not for 
themselves or their own salvation, nor even for 
their country alone and their homes, but for a 
better future for the whole race ^ — that the gen- 
erations to come might never suffer from the hor- 
rors which have accumulated upon our own — that 
once for all the arrogance and impiety which had 
caused these might be overthrown. We know that 
this is the spirit of Christ and His Cross. 

5^ 

But besides bringing us thus into the fellowship 
of Christ's sufferings God has not left us in this 
war without the power of His resurrection. I 

^ IV. The Witness of France. 

^ See especially pp. 99-101, 106-109. 



170 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

have had occasion to speak of this also in other 
addresses,^ and I speak of what I know. I have 
seen or have corresponded with the families of 
students and graduates of my own University who 
have fallen in the war. And as Moderator of 
my Church I have had to visit several provinces 
of Scotland, particularly the northern. We did not 
touch a family but had some member on naval 
or military service, and hardly one but had made 
the uttermost offering for the cause for which 
we were at war; till every home in sight stood for 
a symbol of sacrifice, and every smoking hearth 
seemed an altar. But among all these, save one 
or two, I have found no fear, no complaining, no 
resentment, far less either any vindictiveness or 
any despair: nothing but quiet resignation and a 
patient hope. The grounds of this were just the 
conscience of the sacredness of our cause and 
trust in the Faithfulness and Love of God, and 
in His power over death as well as over life — 
the simple faith that the Lord redeemeth the soul 
of His servants, and that none who trust in Him 
shall be desolate. The deaths of the sons of 
those Christian homes in such a faith for such a 
cause could only be the entrances on higher forms 
1 P. 148. 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 171 

of service; and the survivors had the example of 
the faith and courage of their heroes to bear them 
up through the time of their separation from 
them. I am bound to say that it was these gen- 
eral convictions rather than any specifically Chris- 
tian dogmas and facts, which I found to be the 
sustaining power in those families. But at the 
same time we must remember that those are 
families which have been trained for generations 
in the life and immortality which Jesus brought 
to light through His gospel and in the knowledge 
of the fact of His Resurrection. Still it was the 
Faithfulness of God which mainly inspired the 
assurance that such sacrifices could not be in vain 
either for this life or for the next. 

Side by side with this faith there have been 
produced, as you know, among many of our 
mourners — more In England than in Scotland — 
those revivals of "spiritualism" (so-called) , which 
the experience of war so often seems to favour. 
The temptation to seek for physical communica- 
tion with the beloved dead Is a very ancient and 
most natural one ; the motives which excite it com- 
mand our respect. And who can fail to appre- 
ciate the genuineness and the pathos of the hunger, 
which readily accepts the slightest fragments of 



ITS OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

evidence that such communications have been 
achieved? Yet from the experience in our own 
day of the effects of the habit we must appreciate 
the anxiety of the prophets to warn their people 
from it. For neither then nor now does it seem 
possible to resort to such practices except at the 
cost of the rational and ethical forces in religion. 
We have among ourselves proofs that the habit 
does weaken the judgment of those who seek the 
dead by such ways, and does taint the characters 
of the media who profess to satisfy them. These 
media and the alleged results they produce are 
often unworthy both of the pious yearnings which 
prompt a resort to them, and of the blessed souls 
that are the object of those yearnings. Fre^ 
quently purely pagan in temper, the offered com- 
munications are on the whole so ambiguous, or so 
irrelevant, or so scrappy, as to suggest that if real, 
they have been framed to evade the jealous 
scrutiny of some celestial censor. What are all 
such results, even when the most charitable judg- 
ment has been formed of them, compared with the 
sufficient assurances we have through His Word 
and Spirit of the mercy and faithfulness of our 
God. For the rest we have Christ's own judg- 
ment that messages from the dead would have no 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 173 

real moral Influence on the living: // they hear 
not Moses and the prophets neither will they he 
persuaded if one rise from the dead. 



There Is just one other point on which the war 
has brought us back to the teaching of Christ. 
You may remark, and justly, that In what I have 
said on the fellowship of Christ's sufferings and 
the power of His Resurrection, I have been speak- 
ing only of Christian families and of their sons. 
What of the many soldiers who, without faith or 
consciousness of the spiritual Ideals for which 
we fight, have evinced an equal heroism and as 
freely given their lives for our cause? 

A countless number of rough, wild men, as 
careless and profane as Esau, have made as full a 
sacrifice as the religious souls of whom we have 
been speaking. Well, In them we see but another 
proof of how readily our timid respectability 
escapes from the teaching of our Lord. His tests 
were different from ours, and the tests of war are 
different, and those two are sometimes startllngly 
similar. Our Lord told us plainly that greater 
love hath no man than that a man lay down his 



174. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

life for his friends; He pointed the righteous of 
His day to the harlots and publicans going into 
the Kingdom of God before them; and on the 
Cross He accepted a fellow-sufferer who after 
a life of crime acknowledged Him in the moment 
of death. The strictest of us dare not limit the 
number of our fallen or of our enemy's fallen, 
who for the character of their dying were recog- 
nised and accepted by so searching and merciful 
a Judge. But apart from the question of their 
particular fates in another life, which is not before 
us now, do not the heroism and self-sacrifice, the 
cheerful bearing of hardships and pain, and the 
comradeship faithful unto death, which so many 
untrained and reckless characters have shown, 
recall our Lord's vision of the spiritual capacity 
of the common man and His test of men not by 
profession but by loyalty to His spirit? Not 
every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, but 
he that doeth the will of My Father. Certainly 
the war has discovered to us moral possibilities 
that are latent in the most unlikely men — possi- 
bilities for the latency of which the men them- 
selves are less to blame than is the society whose 
routine in peace furnished them neither with ex- 
ample nor with any sacred urgency. 



RELIGIOUS EFFECTS OF THE WAR 175 



The question is often asked what attitude will 
our returning soldiers take to their churches and 
to the forms of religious service to which they 
were accustomed before the war. And it is some- 
times answered that they will come back indiffer- 
ent to our creeds and impatient of our routines of 
worship and old-fashioned pieties ; drastic changes 
will be required for them in all these. That re- 
mains to be seen; their experiences in the war may 
work both ways. If some come back with the de- 
sire, created by camp and hut services, for briefer, 
and more broken and varied forms of worship and 
religious teaching, others may return only hungry 
for the older fashions — as some in my country 
have already done. 

But be that as it may, the results we can predict 
with certainty will be simpler and more funda- 
mental. Our men are coming back with great ex- 
periences of reality, of catholicity, and of com- 
radeship. They have faced death, either in them- 
selves or in others they have known to the utter- 
most what sacrifice means; and we may be sure 
that they will have keen eyes for any pretence in 



176 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

our preaching and for any slackness in our living. 
They have seen men of all creeds and denomi- 
nations happily join in worship and equally rise 
to duty; and they will not be tolerant of our many 
religious divisions. They have known what com- 
rades men can be in danger and fronting death 
and they will expect a heartier comradeship among 
their fellow-members in the churches. On these 
things let us be in no doubt. We shall all need 
to be more real, more self-sacrificing, more catho- 
lic, and more loyal to each other. For the rest 
let us remember that, as in war so in peace, the 
eternal moralities abide and the gospel of God 
through Jesus Christ His Son is the same yester- 
day, to-day, and for ever. 



FAITH AND SERVICE 



VIII 
FAITH AND SERVICE 

Give Thy strength unto Thy servant, 

And save the son of Thy handmaid. — Ps. Ixxxvi. 1 6. 

O Lord, truly I am thy servant, 

And the son of Thy handmaid; 

Thou hast loosed my bonds. — Ps. cxvi. i6. 

The Psalm to which the first of these verses be- 
longs has been called "The Prayer of the Aver- 
age Believer". It is an awkward description, but 
with this truth in it, that the Psalm rises from a 
sense of need universal among men, and that its 
faith, like that of the other Psalm, rests upon 
grounds which are the only sure bases of faith 
anywhere or at any time : the nature of God Him- 
self ; the believer's experience of a personal rela- 
tion to Him; and (in consequence) the believer's 
place and share in the family which God has 
founded on earth — the Church, which in the 
Psalmist's day, and hardly less in our own, has 

179 



180 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

come by a community of suffering and faith to be 
almost coincident with the nation. 

All the prayers which these Psalms utter, 
emerge from a very human sense of helplessness 
and need. / found trouble and sorrow. I was 
brought low, and He helped me. I am poor and 
needy. In the day of my trouble do I call unto 
Thee — or my day of trouble, as though "in my 
time of sorrow". The phrase brings us all to 
His side, for which of us is without such a day — 
whether it be dim and unheroic, that perhaps we 
could not define any more clearly than our 
brothers, these Psalmists, have defined theirs; or 
whether it carry those nobler agonies, which have 
fallen upon our nation and on each of us singly in 
the present tragedy of the world. 



The first of the grounds of the Psalmist's faith 
is the Divine Nature — God Himself, God's char- 
acter and power. Many of the verses in the 
eighty-sixth Psalm, introduced by the word for, 
are simple declarations of what God is and wills 
to do. For Thou, Lord, art good, and ready to 
forgive; and plenteous in mercy. For Thou art 



FAITH AND SERVICE 181 

great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God 
alone. For Thou, O Lord, art a God full of com- 
passion, and gracious, long-suffering, and plente- 
ous in mercy and truth. The primal and everlast- 
ing confidence of man lies here. According as men 
have understood the character of God their own 
characters have developed; according as they have 
trusted that character their hope has been sure 
both for this life and that which is to come. From 
the first of revelation to the present day our 
prophets have begun here and have come back 
here, while even those who have lost faith in 
everything else have at least clung to the instinct 
that God is good. 

You remember that when God would redeem 
His people from the tyranny of Egypt, He bad^ 
them believe in His sufficiency: / am what I am. 
And it was because they believed in this — without 
at the time understanding all it meant — ^that when 
His call came they rose like one man and followed 
their leaders to the desert and to war. Their re- 
ward was given them even there in the unfolding 
of what that suflliciency contained; so that with the 
righteousness of the Law there were revealed the 
riches of the Divine Grace, and the love of the 
Almighty came home to their hearts even among 



182 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the thunders of Sinai. The Lord passed by before 
him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord, a God 
full of compassion, and gracious, slow to anger, 
and plenteous in mercy and truth; keeping mercy 
for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, 
and sin. And thou shalt remember all the way 
which the Lord thy God hath led thee through 
the wilderness — ^yes, and we may add through 
years of sore and fluctuating war — to know what 
was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep 
His commandments or no. And thou shalt con- 
sider in thine heart that as a man chasteneth his 
son, so the Lord thy God chasteneth thee. You 
see that (to use Scriptural language) God would 
not only bare His arm as when He smote their 
enemies before them, but He would lay bare His 
Heart as well. And so through every following 
generation, the progress of their religion meant 
the progress of their knowledge of God — of 
His Righteousness and of His Grace — and 
every rise and refinement in their morality was 
their response to what He told them of Himself. 
Even the assurance of the life to come which was 
so slow to arrive in Israel, even the conviction of 
the immortality of the individual, found its sources 
in the people's experience of the reasonableness, 



FAITH AND SERVICE 183 

the faithfulness, and the power of God. And just 
because God is Love, a love more true and self- 
sacrificing than the most heroic among men, just 
because humility, patience, and suffering to the 
utmost for others are the essence of the perfect 
character, we find it not difficult but natural to 
believe in the Incarnation, the Passion, and the 
saving Death of the Son of God Himself. 

All the uncertainties and corruptions of faith 
have sprung from forgetfulness of this; and his- 
tory is strewn with the wrecks of religions that 
have sought from God something else than Him- 
self. We commit the same mistake still. We put 
our creeds, we put our Churches, we put even the 
letter of Scripture between our hearts and the liv- 
ing God. My brethren, it is trust, not in a scheme 
of salvation, but in the heart of the Eternal and 
Almighty, which thought of us when we were yet 
sinners, in the Infinite Love which came to our 
side in our warfare with temptation, and took 
the curse of our moral defeats upon Itself — not 
trust in Scripture, but the vision which Scripture 
gives us of the Living God; not the amount of 
creed a man believes nor the Church he belongs 
to, but the powers of God's justice and grace, with 
which both of these bring him into touch. For 



184. OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

everywhere and always this is eternal life, to know 
Thee, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. 

Certainly there is nothing else which is going 
to carry us through the present war. The arro- 
gance of arms and the criminal statesmanship 
which provoked it, and the atrocious cruelties with 
which it has been conducted by our enemies, espe- 
cially in Belgium, Armenia, and on the seas — as 
the Lord reigneth, these cannot triumph. As 
righteousness and judgment are the foundations 
of His throne, such forces are destined to fail. 
They have failed already in the ambitions with 
which they flung themselves on the peace of the 
world. If we be dismayed before them, our dis- 
may is due to our want of the knowledge of God. 
If our faith in Him be sound, and our obedience 
abide to the strong conscience He kindled among 
us, there can be no fear of the end. Whatsoever 
troubles or disasters may still befall us, there can 
under God be no fear of the end. 

It was the same truth which Thomas Chalmers 
used to enforce. In a sermon which he preached 
during our last great war against a tyranny that 
threatened the liberty of Europe, he applied this 
truth to our conduct. "Dismiss," he said, "your 
scholastic conceptions of the Deity, and keep to 



FAITH AND SERVICE 185 

that warm and affecting view of Him that we 
have in the Bible. For if we do not, our hearts 
will remain shut against its powerful and pathetic 
representations of the character of God." "Not 
only do we owe to His liberality every breath, 
but draw from it every comfort we enjoy. It 
proves His love to men that He opens His hand 
and feeds them all; but it is a far higher proof 
of love that He so loved them as to give up His 
only begotten Son in their behalf. All your gifts 
are as nothing to this. Before such an example 
there can be but one test of the adequacy of your 
benevolence — what is the extent of your sacrifice 
in performing it? Be ye perfect, even as your 
Father in Heaven is perfect." 

Yes, for our conduct as well as our faith — and 
especially for those duties of self-denial and sac- 
rifice which the righteous cause of our nations at 
present demands from us — the one sufficient in- 
spiration is God Himself, as He is in Christ 
Jesus His Son. 



If the first ground of the Psalmist's faith be the 
character of God, his second is his personal re- 
lation to God. His expression of this is somewhat 



186 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

distorted in our English versions: preserve my 
soul, for I am holy, or, as the Revised Version 
gives it, / am godly. So rendered, it sounds self- 
righteous. But it is something very different. 
The original cannot be put in one English word. 
It describes not moral merit but a religious ex- 
perience and temper. It means one who has 
known the faithful mercy of God and who has 
shown love and loyalty to Him in return. When 
the Psalmist says to God, / am godly, he means 
"I am Thine by the experience of Thy grace to 
me, and by the answer of my heart to it" ; and he 
makes this relation the second ground of his faith : 
not only Thou art God, but Thou art my God. 

There are two subjects which each of these 
Psalmists calls his own: my trouble and my God. 
For as really as a man is sure of the first, so can 
he be sure of the second. Pain gets a long way 
into the heart, and there is nothing that a man 
may feel more to be his very own; the heart 
knoweth its own bitterness. Pain gets a long way 
into the heart, but the Love of God goes deeper 
and awakes an even keener sense of possession. 
Deeper than any sorrow or doubt are a tender 
conscience and penitence for sin. Yet these are 



FAITH AND SERVICE 187 

only the beginning of our God's dealing with us; 
the first fruits of His Spirit to each of us per- 
sonally. The rest will come. How much con- 
science and penitence promise, how much they en- 
sure, the experience of millions of common men 
who have responded to them can testify: the being 
brought away from one's past, the assurance of 
pardon, the conquest of evil habits, the ineffable 
persuasion of being trusted by our merciful 
Father, the sense of such permanence in the new 
elements of character granted to us that neither 
life not death can be conceived as destroying them, 
with all those instincts of faith and trust which a 
faithful God cannot forsake or disappoint. It 
is on such experimental grounds that men grow 
sure of their future in this life, and, without any 
other argument or promise than are here im- 
plicit, adventure upon the life beyond. 

In addition, each of the Psalmists says, / am 
Thy servant. There is no greater assurance that 
a man can lay to his heart than the conscience 
that he is doing God's will and in the spirit of 
Christ serving his fellow-men. Whatever doubt 
or failure fall on him the sense of being loyal to 
his trust, and of being of use in the service God 



188 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

has commanded, must sustain and make quick 
the hope of deliverance. Whether in darkness 
or light, in perplexity or clear vision the test is 
unfailing. Am I Thy servant? Am I profitable, 
and even if that cannot be claimed, am I at least 
obedient, obedient to the orders and example of 
my Lord? 

Be it ours, my brethren, to maintain through the 
distractions and disasters of these times the 
strength and purity of our personal religion; to 
see to it that our communion with God and our 
private obedience to Him are not broken or weak- 
ened by other interests and engagements however 
sacred these may be ; to be instant in prayer, regu- 
lar in our use of the means of grace, and care- 
ful to maintain the pieties which the strain and 
sacrifices of the war sometimes threaten to inter- 
rupt. Our nations and the sacred cause commit- 
ted to them depend on the faith, the purity, the 
obedience and honour towards God of their in- 
dividual members; on the resolution and buoyancy 
of their single souls. And these are to be main- 
tained by communion with Him who said, My 
Grace is sufficient for thee. 



FAITH AND SERVICE 189 



Interpreters have been divided as to the mean- 
ing of the words son of thine handmaid. The 
metaphor itself is clear; in ancient times no slaves 
were regarded as so reliable as those born in the 
household. But do the Psalmists apply the meta- 
phor to the natural or to the ecclesiastical family? 
Some Interpreters take the first opinion and say 
that the Psalmist calls to mind his own pious 
mother. Others hold that the phrase refers to the 
Church, which In those days was the Nation, and, 
by our community of faith and sacrifice, has to- 
day again so much become the Nation. Others 
think that the Psalmists only intend a servant truly 
devoted to his Lord and His personal interests. 
Among these possibilities St. Augustine, as usual, 
takes his own beautiful way, and applies the say- 
ing first to Christ and then through Him to all 
believers. "Thy servant, and the son of Thy 
handmaid — 'of what handmaid?' (he asks, and 
answers), 'Of her who, when He was announced 
as about to be born of her, answered and said, 
Behold the handmaid of the Lord!' Of her the 
Lord was born in the form of a servant. And 



190 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

each several Christian placed in the body of 
Christ may say, save the son of Thy handmaid." 
So far Augustine; and Matthew Henry remarks: 
"The children of godly parents who were betimes 
dedicated to the Lord may plead it with Him that 
if they come under the discipline of the family 
they are also entitled to the privileges of it." 

In this question the most of us Scots and of you 
Americans can have no difficulty. What seem to 
others to be exclusive alternatives we combine. 
We were reckoned of the membership of the 
Church on the strength of our birth into a Chris- 
tian family, and on the vows taken for us by our 
own parents. None of us can separate the 
Mother at whose knees we first learned to pray 
from the Mother-Church to which she brought 
us and by which we were baptised, instructed, and 
received to Communion. To us the Church and 
the Home are one. It is a noble heritage, a debt 
heavier than most children born into this world 
owe to their families, their Church, and their 
Nation. Let us abide loyal to the obligation, 
especially when in our own sons we have the in- 
spiring example of courage and obedience unto 
death. 

The present war has given heroic evidence of 



FAITH AND SERVICE 191 

the integrity and devotion of the children of the 
Christian homes of my own land. It is a certain 
fact that, while the voluntary system of enlistment 
still prevailed, some 90 per cent, of the sons of 
the manses of the Church of Scotland, who were 
of military age, had gone on service with their 
country's Forces ; and I believe that the proportion 
was just as great in the manses of my own Church. 
Figures are not available for the other homes of 
our Scottish Churches, but if they were they would 
tell the same tale. To our young men the call, 
acclaimed by the conscience of the whole Nation, 
came from the Highest source; and in answering 
it so nobly, and (as so many have done) in freely 
laying down their lives for its sake, they were ful- 
filling the prayers of their parents and the vows 
which in baptism their fathers and mothers and 
their Church took to God for them. Not for 
glory went they forth from us, nor to fight for 
fighting's sake, nor in ignorance of the awful 
possibilities which lay before each of them; but 
conscious of the sacred issues of the war, de- 
liberately, and because the Hand of God was upon 
them in the strength of the most righteous cause 
for which nations were ever called to do battle. 
Some months ago I received a letter from a coun- 



192 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

try manse of the Church of Scotland, whose son, 
a graduate of my own University, had just fallen, 
and I take from it these sentences: "From the 
brave bright letters sent home from the Front 
one fails to learn the truth, that some of the 
writers know In their hearts that they are tread- 
ing the road to Calvary. As I looked at the last 
photograph sent home from France of our boy, 
its expression seemed only sad, but I know now 
what it means — 'I shall not come back, but I am 
going forward'. And his is the story of so many 
others." 

My younger friends, in those Immediately ahead 
of you in years you have examples of unselfishness 
and heroism more powerful than any generation 
ever had presented to it. Follow them as they 
have followed Christ. Remember, as they did, 
your debts to your Homes, to your Church, and 
to your Nation, but behind and beneath all these 
your dedication to your Lord, and — In War and 
Peace alike — rest on His Character and His 
Power, His Love for each of you singly, and His 
Grace that will never fail you. Lord, I am Thy 
servant, and the son of Thy handmaid. 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 



IX 

THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 

"Wherefore, seeing we also are compassed about with 
so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, 
and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run 
with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto 
Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith; who, for the 
joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, despising 
the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne 
of God."— Heb. xii. i, 2. 

So great a cloud — rather so dense a cloud. It is 
a single word used of clouds which pile themselves 
heavily on the horizon, but it is also applied by 
Greek poets to throngs of men on the battle-field, 
pressing down upon those who stand to meet them ; 
and this Is rather the meaning here, as Is seen from 
the phrase compassed about. The cloud Is there- 
fore not the pe0os ayiov KoX heiUs of Clement of 
Alexandria's fancy, "a holy and pellucid cloud" 
gloriously resting above in a serene sky, but rather 
a cloud that has come down upon those who are 

195 



196 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

still fighting on the earth — TepLKelnevov, lying about 
us, and enveloping our ranks. In Bengel's hap- 
pier phrase it is "an urgent cloud". And this, as 
we shall see, is in harmony with the purpose of 
the writer which is not sentiment but morality. 

The word witnesses is capable of several mean- 
ings, of various degrees of moral value, from that 
of mere "spectators" upwards; and these mean- 
ings (let us at once admit) may have overlapped 
in the writer's imagination or swiftly suggested 
each Gcher to him just as they do to ourselves. But 
the context makes clear which is the dominant. 

After a fashion common in the New Testa- 
ment the writer sees the moral life as a race; and 
it is natural to begin to interpret his witnesses as 
its interested spectators: thronging above and 
about the arena and watching us with sympathy 
upon the same course over which in their time 
they too have struggled. Neither in Scripture nor 
in our spiritual experience is there anything to for- 
bid such sympathies to our blessed dead. On the 
contrary, we can hardly realise that continuation 
of their personalities and their service, of which 
we are assured in Christ, without the conviction 
that they still remember and still love us ; that, in 
particular, they cannot remain themselves, they 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 197 

cannot still be themselves, if they have already for- 
gotten how they left their warfare unfinished, left 
it unfinished to us who still hold the field. And to 
such inferences of heart and of reason we may 
cling the more confidently as we read that, when 
His servants enter the Presence of their Lord and 
see Him as He is, they become like Him — ^like 
Him 

Who still remembers in the skies 
His tears, His agonies and cries. 

Such beliefs are natural and have their proper 
comfort, provided we hold them in subordination 
to the faith that He is our great High Priest, 
who ever liveth to make intercession for us, and 
whose grace and sympathy are alone our suffi- 
ciency. For, as the text concludes, it is not look- 
ing unto them but looking unto Jesus, which is our 
duty and our salvation. 

The meaning "spectators," however, if it is im- 
plied in our text, is hardly the main intention of 
the writer. His witnesses (as we see from other 
passages in his Epistle) are witnesses not of us 
but to the faith given them by God and proved 
by them in life and death. The text enforces not 
so much their interest in us as our duty because of 
them: not so much that they are looking on us 



198 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

as that we should look in the same direction as 
they. It is not only their sympathy which the 
writer sees enveloping us, but the more urgent 
force of their example; and this not a past but a 
present example; so that we may bend our wills 
and stand true to what they have testified and still 
testify. The central emphasis, then, is that their 
influence is not past but present ; and that we are 
not to betray all they stood, fought and died for 
by our slackness. Not lest we forget what they 
were, but lest we fail to feel them about us still : 
and so betray them and their cause to their very 
faces. 

Their presence, their urgency, and our duty In 
face of them — ^these are the three emphases of 
the text. 

Four years ago, the cloud of witnesses hung 
somewhat far upon the skies of my people, drift- 
ing now and then a little nearer as there passed up 
into it the face of one we loved or honoured — par- 
ent, teacher, leader or comrade — taken singly and 
at intervals, as is Death's normal way in time of 
peace ; but the mass of it remained distant, vague, 
and cold. How near these four years have 
brought it all, none know better than the families 
of the Scottish people, whose sons have already 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 199 

fallen in thousands. How encompassing it is, and 
how densely filled with "kent" and dear faces — 
for the most part young and fair, yet stamped with 
as urgent and in many cases, as deliberate and 
august a witness to righteousness and to faith in 
God, as the faces of the early martyrs; and like 
these it is a witness sealed in blood. 

Nor is it sufficient in this connection to speak 
only of the Fallen. No one who has watched, as 
I have watched, our hospital ships at French 
quays, filling with the constant stream of wounded 
from the front; no one who has spoken into the 
faces of thousands of our Scots soldiers or taken 
the Communion with them on their last steps to 
the trenches; no one who has seen the shrunken 
battalions marching back from the battle worn 
and weary but with steadfast faces — can have 
failed to feel his cloud of witnesses still more 
dense and still more closely encompassing. To 
have to hold back as I saw them go forward felt 
like being a deserter! We knew, as we watched 
them, that to be again mean or selfish or unbe- 
lieving, ever again to compromise with right and 
duty would be to betray them and the sacred 
Cause for which they have fought and so many 
of them have died. 



SOO OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

I do not say that all, whether the dead or the 
living, have been able to articulate their testi- 
mony even to themselves. But as a French 
schoolmaster writes from the trenches : "Even 
under the cannon we do not forget the ideal for 
which we are battling. To know that the accom- 
plishment of our present duty surpasses in range 
both our own powers and our time and even our 
country — since it concerns humanity in the most 
profound and complete sense of the word — is a 
stimulus to us of incalculable vigour. This sen- 
timent you will find not only among those whom 
a certain culture has refined and rendered con- 
scious of the part they play, you will find it again 
very powerful — though necessarily a little vague 
— among the most humble and least cultivated of 
the soldiers." 

So that whether fallen or still fighting they are 
all to-day urgent upon us in a volume of faith, of 
devotion to a spiritual duty, and of fearless self- 
sacrifice such as no generation In the history of 
mankind has ever felt the weight of. There is 
hardly a phrase which this writer applies to his 
witnesses that is not deserved by ours. Literally 
out of weakness they were made strong, and 
waxed valiant in fight; for they came of a people 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 201 

unprepared for war, and till it broke they had 
with a few exceptions no military training; yet in 
a few months they proved the equals of any 
soldiery in Europe, and all this by the strength of 
those spiritual qualities, without which their multi- 
tude and the armaments we have tardily supplied 
them would have been of no avail. Did they go 
out not knowing whither they went? They went 
in obedience to a call which came to them from 
the Highest Source, and whose authority was ac- 
claimed by the universal conscience of their race. 
Out of a civilisation, which (as we were all com- 
ing to tremble at) rested upon much that was 
doubtful and some things that were rotten, and 
which had been rent from top to bottom by the 
perfidy of those who boasted themselves as its 
supreme representatives and guardians, our sailors 
and soldiers have gone forth desiring, fighting and 
dying for, a better world, a world that hath foun- 
dations, whose builder and maker is God. In 
faith they fought and wrought righteousness; in 
faith they endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 
And so, too, many have died in faith, not having 
received the promises, but having seen them and 
greeted them from afar. It is not only for the 
defence of our lands, it is not only for the turning 



202 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

of a ruthless invader from our homes that we 
thank them to-day; but that they encompass us 
with so urgent a cloud of spiritual force, and with 
their conscience, their faith, and their splendid 
devotion have come between us and the sins which 
have beset our national life. 

But our text concludes, looking unto Jesus. 
The war and the sacrifices it has laid upon us 
will not have been in vain, if they carry us back to 
Christ and His Cross, and especially in these four 
respects : if they restore to us His full revelation 
of God; If they bring home to us the distinction 
between the peace of this world and the Peace He 
alone can give; if they burn into our hearts the 
supreme lessons of the Cross — ^the need of sac- 
rifice even unto death in order to overcome evil, 
the moral force of vicarious suffering; and if 
while drawing us Into the fellowship of His suffer- 
ings they throw us back upon the power of His 
Resurrection. In other addresses in this volume 
I have tried to show that these are among the 
religious effects of this war upon my people.^ 
Here, in connection with my text, I shall dwell only 

^ See above, the Addresses on "Peace — False and True" 
and "The Religious Effects of the War." 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 203 

on the last of them. To us in part has come again 
what came to Israel from her sons who fell in the 
Maccabean wars and what the Christian Church 
won from the blood of the martyrs. There has 
been born in numbers of our Scottish people a 
new faith in God as the God of the living, and 
in His power and faithfulness for the life to come 
as well as for that which now Is. We cannot be- 
lieve but that the deaths of our sons in such a faith 
for such a cause are but the entrances on higher 
forms of service. His servants shall serve Him. 
We do not pray for their salvation, because we 
trust the faithfulness of our God. They have 
fulfilled the love of which Christ tells us there is 
none greater, that a man lay down his life for his 
friends. Though we miss their bodily presence 
with a pain that never lessens, though in an 
emptier world we shall long for them till the end 
of our own days in it, we shall not mourn nor com- 
plain. To use terms applied by the early Christians 
to their dead they are our "defuncti et praemissi," 
those who have acquitted themselves of their 
duty and who have been sent on before us. Both 
sea and land are the more beautiful to-day as the 
scenes of their heroism, and more sacred as the 
altars of their sacrifice. Yet their passage but 



204 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

draws us nearer to the Lord above, to Whose ex- 
ample they rose. And they have not vanished. 
We have them with us still, a cloud of witnesses 
compassing us about. If our spirits are awake, 
our communion with them is even more close than 
when they were beside us in the flesh; for their 
characters and their testimonies, of which we may 
have had little inkling before, have grown to a 
pitch of proof and influence that can never fail 
to rebuke, permeate, and uplift our own. 

With such trust in the father, of whom every 
family in heaven and earth is named, with such 
assurance of His faithfulness to them and such 
experience of their present moral influence on 
ourselves, we have no need to resort to those 
means by which some — ^through a noble error of 
their feelings — are tempted to seek physical com- 
munication with their beloved dead. But I have 
elsewhere spoken sufficiently of this.^ 

We, who are older, and some of us much older, 
than they were, remembering the worst of war 
that it falls most heavily on the young, will rec- 
ognise our debt to the youth of our peoples, and 
feel an added duty towards the fresh ideals and 
causes bursting on the world with this last recruit 
^ See above, pp. 171-173. 



THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES 205 

to its generations. To the inspiration we draw 
from their courage as individuals, we older men 
must add the care — ^that the visions and enthu- 
siasms of our sons do not suffer from this des- 
perate thinning of their ranks, across all the coun- 
tries of Europe and soon to take place on your 
own continent; that more than ever we control the 
accumulating prejudices of our years and content- 
ment with things as they are, that we husband 
such force and freshness as remain in ourselves 
and continue, alongside the young men who are 
left to us, to play our rapidly diminishing part 
with unabated zest and courage. 

On you who are their contemporaries or just 
behind them has fallen an obligation heavier per- 
haps than was ever felt by any generation in the 
history of our people. In those whom it is most 
natural for you to follow, as being immediately 
in front of you, you have a wealth of example that 
should control and inspire you throughout your 
lives. See that you cherish the value of spiritual 
ideals both for men and nations, and without 
flinching face the full cost of your duty to them. 
In ways that may show no heroism but need no 
less virtue and toil, see that you practise that faith- 
fulness in service and sacrifice to which they have 



206 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

risen. Accept discipline as patiently as they did. 
Accept discipline, I say, for that is the foundation 
of all. Be careful of the details in the routine of 
your life ; but be equally ready for Its emergencies. 
Never grudge the call to extra work, nor shrink 
from danger in the way to it. Never keep back 
your strength in selfish remonstrance at the in- 
equalities of reward or fortune, which in peace 
are almost as great as in war. If you thus train 
yourselves in the work of ordinary days, and in 
answer to God's more urgent calls, you shall be 
able, like them who have shown you the way, to 
make the last resignation of life itself in humble 
hope and peace. 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES^ 

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art 
thou disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall 
yet praise Him, Who is the health of my countenance, 
and my God. — Ps. xlii. 5, ii ; xliii. 5. 

The two Psalms from which this triple refrain 
is taken are properly one Psalm, which the re- 
frain divides into three strophes. In these a 
wronged and banished man pours out — to use his 
own words — pours out his soul upon him or about 
him. 

He had been in high position among his people. 
Through years of peace he had led them to the 
house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, 
a multitude that kept holy day. But cruel and un- 
just men had torn him from the sacred habits and 
fellowship, which had sustained him, and, as it 

^ An Address chiefly delivered to soldiers of the United 
States Army. 

209 



210 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

seemed, from God Himself. They stabbed him 
with their taunts of this: as with a sword in my 
bones mine enemies reproach me, saying daily 
unto me, Where is thy God? Indeed his own 
thoughts conspired with them: / say unto God 
my Rock, Why hast Thou forgotten me? And 
the strange scenery that surrounded him was in 
the conspiracy too. In the far corner of the 
country to which he was banished, the land of Jor- 
dan and the huge Hermons, where the rains are 
violent and the waterfalls roar down the steep 
hills, all these things seemed to re-echo and 
to swell the floods of his grief: deep calleth 
unto deep at the noise of Thy cataracts: all Thy 
waves and Thy breakers are gone over me! He 
was drenched, deafened, and buffeted by sorrow. 

But in this threefold refrain he turns on the 
coward in himself, challenges his doubting soul, 
and recovers his courage — the health of my 
countenance and my God. 

I come to you from a people who, during the 
last four years, have required every ounce of cour- 
age they could command. For, to begin with, 
their faith was shocked by the most sudden and 
treacherous assault on the peace of the world, the 
most impious conspiracy between brute force and 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 211 

arrogant intellect which history records. And 
then, and since then, they have had constant ex- 
perience of an incredible faithlessness and cruelty 
on the part of a people calling itself Christian 
and boasting the superiority of its culture. In the 
interview with which he honoured me, your own 
President said: "For four years I have been 
schooling myself in the incredible till it has become 
terribly familiar to me." That is the feeling of 
every civilised man outside Germany. German 
policy and German conduct, unblushingly acknowl- 
edged by German lips, have staggered us. Sheer 
crime has been avowed as a necessity. Weak 
peoples have been told that their weakness has no 
rights, and strong peoples that the mere will to 
war is the proof of strength and sanction suffi- 
cient for designs, however unjust, upon the rest 
of mankind. We had to face these forces, which 
for more than a generation had been preparing 
themselves for this outbreak — we had to face 
them, ourselves unprepared. And we knew our 
unpreparedness. We had to expect in consequence 
retreat and defeat, and these and many disasters 
have come upon us one after another. There was 
the retreat from Mons, the defeat of the only 
force we had ready. There were the failure and 



212 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

the awful losses at Galllpoli, the failure and the 
surrender in Mesopotamia. All our resources, 
physical and moral, have been strained to the 
breaking point. Our sons have fallen in hundreds 
of thousands, till love, the heart of courage, has 
almost been drowned in sorrow. Pity and indig- 
nation, those fine tributaries to courage, have been 
stunned by the endless recurrence of atrocities 
upon atrocities. Sometimes, too. Providence has 
seemed so indifferent to the war and its welter of 
suffering, so blind to the crimes which have caused 
it that some could cry with the Psalmist: Why 
has Thou forgotten me, why go I mourning he- 
cause of the oppression of the enemy f 

Such have been our trials and our agonies, and 
I am come to tell you who are drawing after us 
into them, and who will have need of the same 
courage, what, with the Psalmist, we have found 
the sources of courage to be. Simply and defi- 
nitely they are these three — a just cause, a clean 
heart, and faith in God. 



Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against 
an ungodly nation! The Germans have appealed 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 213 

to a national deity; we know no other God than 
the Judge of the whole earth, and we have to 
plead to Him, not ourselves — for we know our 
unfitness to be His instruments — nor our race, nor 
any powers He may have given us, but just our 
Cause. How righteous that Cause is I have tried 
to show in other addresses, and mainly through 
the mouths of German witnesses. The Chancel- 
lor's avowal of crime In the invasion of Belgium; 
the instinct we had from the first, and which every 
phase of German policy and war has confirmed 
and articulated, that this was only one item in a 
general defiance of the moral law, a reckless, un- 
limited design on the freedom and rights of all 
other peoples ; again, our sense of duty to a nation 
we had sworn to defend and whom Germany, 
equally sworn with ourselves, had betrayed; again, 
the contradiction between her arrogant claims to 
impose her culture on mankind, put forth when 
she seemed to be victorious, and her cries, when 
things went against her, that she was fighting only 
in self-defence; again, her further perjuries to 
Russia; again her responsibility, as her own sons 
have told us, for the Armenian massacres, and 
her efforts to stir the Moslem world to a "holy 
war" against the Christians opposed to her; and 



214 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

again, the long ghastly succession of her atrocities 
on sea and on land — all these are facts which have 
made clear to us, as they certainly will make clear 
to posterity, the sure and urgent justice of our 
Cause. 

On this from the very first we have based any 
courage we have had. Through the shock and 
confusion of the outbreak of war (as I have else- 
where pointed out),^ the narrow but signal line 
of our duty to Belgium was what we rallied upon. 
That duty united us as nothing else could have 
done, and steeled the national heart under the 
trembling sense of our unpreparedness for it. 
And the increasing manifestation of the justice 
for which we were fighting — through every fresh 
exposure of the aims and conduct of our foes — has 
been to us a daily source of courage since. Noth- 
ing but a bare sense of right brought us through 
the many dark months we had to live. Nothing 
else could have rendered possible the willing sac- 
rifices of our sons upon the field; or united their 
people behind them to those belated, but when 
they came enormous, preparations, by which, to 
our own surprise, we at last reached material 

iPp. 156-159. 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 215 

equality with the forty years' preparations of the 
foe. 

Soldiers of the United States, you have this firm 
ground of courage to march out upon. Never 
were men called to fight for a better cause. You 
may march, you may fight, you may suffer and die 
without a single misgiving as to its quality. There 
is nothing disreputable here. You follow no 
tyrants, seek no material gain or glory for your 
country, hunt no selfish ends of your own. Your 
flag, the flag of freedom and of union, is raised 
only for the rights of the weak, for the re- 
demption of the oppressed, for justice, liberty, and 
peace — peace that, whether it be granted or de- 
nied to yourselves, shall at least by your sacrifices 
become secure for the generations after you. 



But even a just cause is without avail if the 
fighters for it fail to bring it clean and honest 
hearts. The firmest ground has no firmness to 
feet unsteady in themselves. The credit of the 
strongest cause to which a man may attach him- 
self is not available for his private debts; nor can 
the holiest crusade turn him brave of whom his 



216 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

own conscience still makes a coward. Primitive 
men judged it fatal to serve the altar with strange 
fire. And you and I must know that, easy as it is 
to serve a cause, whose purity is strength to the 
honest heart, only because we have been moved by 
the glamour or popularity of it, no real strength 
can come to us personally from such motives. We 
must be worthy of it in ourselves before its in- 
domitableness can become our individual courage. 
And we can be worthy of it only by being clean. 

Collective enthusiasm in a just cause is an im- 
mense fortitude. And so is the discipline of the 
ranks, the touch of shoulder to shoulder, in a loyal 
comradeship. But war above all things tells us 
that there is another side to the shield. By wounds, 
by disease, by the sorrow of the mother, the widow 
and the orphan, by the last loneliness of each of 
its million deaths, it teaches us that in the ultimate 
resort courage must be individual. Why art thou 
cast down, O MY soul! 

You remember what Tennyson makes Sir Gala- 
had say: — 

My good blade carves the casques of men, 

My tough lance thrusteth sure, 
My strength is as the strength of ten, 

Because my heart is pure. 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 217 

St. Paul puts it better when, in recounting the 
pieces of the whole armour of God, he tells us to 
put on the breastplate of righteousness. In other 
words, the best breastplate is a clean breast — a 
pure heart, a heart at peace with God and man, 
the will to think of others and to serve them and 
not oneself — the unselfish mind that was in Christ. 
He who has these, whatever be his natural nerve, 
can rely on himself, can be sure that he will not 
flinch in emergencies nor give way in danger nor 
in face of death. And as St. Paul tells us — though 
we do not need to be told for we have the witness 
within — we have these not of ourselves. There is 
not one of us whose past will let him wholly trust 
himself. But God can give these through Jesus 
Christ our Lord. There is none so soiled, so 
stunted, so weakened by self-indulgence, so dis- 
turbed by passion, so little able to trust himself, 
but by turning in penitence to God may receive that 
pardon of which the most ethical content is not 
even freedom, but the assurance that God trusts 
him once more for Christ's sake, and sends him 
back to duty and to trial, strong, indebted, and 
dedicated. 

A young French soldier has put it well; "I 
shall fight with a good conscience and without fear, 



218 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

I hope, certainly without hate, because I believe 
our cause to be just. ... I am confident our 
cause is just and good and that we have right on 
our side." But "we must search our hearts to see 
whether we can fight, whether we are suificiently 
in love with the Justice that must be established 
afterwards. . . . We take the oath of alle- 
giance, Lord; we will work to bring about Thy 
Kingdom."^ 



But a just cause and a clean heart are not enough 
without faith in God. For the justice is His, and 
triumphs because God reigns and judges. And 
His, too, is the power to forgive and make clean 
and trusty our hearts within us. So this Psalm, 
which opens with longing for God Himself, comes 
back to Him again through all its debate and its 
trouble. Turning on his coward soul, the Psalmist 
lifts her to God and leaves her with Him. 

Why art thou cast do''un, O my soul? 
And why art thou disquieted within me? 

Or, as we may more nearly render the original, 
^See above, pp. lOO, 107-111. 



COURAGE AND ITS THREE SOURCES 219 

Why dost thou give in, O my soul. 
And be moaning upon mef 

Why give in! However hard be the war, and 
triumphant the foe, God Is and reigns, God of 
the Right, and even my God, so far as I hold to 
the Right, and prove worthy of It. 

Hold thou to God, for I shall yet praise Him, 
The health of my countenance and my God. 

The health, or victory, of my countenance — 
It Is a true version of the Hebrew Idiom, but In 
our language it sounds vague, and probably our 
tongues have slipped over It many a time without 
our hearts understanding what it means. Yet it 
just means health, or victory, of my face. What 
enables me to face up to things — to face up to 
duty, to face up to danger, to face up to death, 
unquivering, undistracted — In short my courage. 

Hold thou to God, for I shall yet praise Him, 
My Courage and my God. 

My Courage and my God! But what, O men. 
Is this, but Jesus Christ Himself, at once the deep- 
est source and the supreme example of courage. 
The deepest source, for He can pardon me peni- 
tent, through pardon give me trust again in myself, 
and assure me as none else can, of the Love and 



220 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

Faithfulness of God Almighty. And the supreme 
example of Courage — Who in our flesh, and 
tempted in all points as we are, endured the con- 
tradiction of sinners against Himself, braved 
spiritual wickedness in high places, faced agony, 
wounds and death, to the perfect sacrifice of Him- 
self for His fellow-men. 



These, then, are the three secrets of Courage 
— a just cause, a clean heart, and faith in God. 
We have yet another — the example of those, 
mostly your own contemporaries, who have pre- 
ceded you in this warfare, and have been brave to 
death itself. The innumerable host of them who 
have fallen have left their battle to you, unfinished 
in sacred trust. See that trust, sealed with their 
blood, through to victory. Can anything base, 
selfish, timid or compromising linger in your 
hearts, as you think of their faith, their love, and 
their full sacrifice I 

Hark the roar grows . . . the thunders reawaken — 
We ask one thing, Lord, only one thing now: 

Hearts high as theirs, who went to death unshaken, 
Courage like theirs to make and keep their vow. 



EPILOGUE 



EPILOGUE 

AMERICA AT WAR 

In the introduction to this volume I have stated 
briefly the dates and circumstances of the ad- 
dresses which it contains. But my heart cannot 
let these go without an addition, as now at home 
it goes back on the long and crowded ways upon 
which it travelled with them. They sought to tell 
of Great Britain's share in the war and to deliver 
part at least of the British message from the heart 
of the war to the American people. But my mis- 
sion, of course, was one of intake as well as of 
forthputting. I both heard what America had to 
say, and saw what she had to give, to her Allies. 
So here I propose to set down some general im- 
pressions which the United States at war have 
left on their British guest, both as he faced large 
gatherings of their citizens and spoke to them, 
and as he listened to their representative speakers 
on the platform, or to the rest of the talk about 
the war which filled their land from one far end 

223 



9.M OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

to the other. Across that continent our experience 
was thronged with incidents and personal relations 
of the highest interest. For all these I can only 
express my gratitude, with the regret that public 
duty so strictly curtailed the private opportunities 
which were generously opened to me. 

The impression which most steadily grew upon 
the visitor to the States was that of the practical 
unanimity of opinion on the character of the war 
— at least of all opinion which had the confidence 
to utter itself. The large number of public 
speakers with whom I had the honour of address- 
ing the conferences and mass meetings (some of 
whose names I give below) ^ are examples of the 
devotion of leading citizens of the United States 
to the task of informing the hundred millions of 
their countrymen upon the moral issues of the war. 

^Ex-President Taft, the Hon. Alton B. Parker; the 
Hon. Theodore Marburg and Mr. Morgenthau, for- 
merly U. S. Ministers to Brussels and Constantinople re- 
spectively; several State Judges and University and Col- 
lege Presidents, Chancellors, Deans and Professors; 
several Bishops and many chairmen of Chambers of Com- 
merce, mercantile and civic clubs, and local federations 
of ministers of religion — the latter including a number of 
coloured pastors in the south. Of all these I spoke most 
with Mr. Marburg, Dr. H. C. King, Dr. N. Boynton, 



EPILOGUE 225 

Whether upon America's duty to the war, or on 
the international relations which should follow it, 
none of these speakers gave forth an uncertain 
sound — and the same is true of the series of ad- 
dresses which we had the privilege of hearing on 
the voyage home from editors of the principal 
American journals and reviews. Again, during 
the five months I was in the States I read leading 
articles in from sixty-five to seventy different daily 
papers of all shades of politics; and found them, 
while frequently criticising the Government, al- 
ways striking the same notes of the urgent justice 
of the Allied cause and of America's duty — and 
striking them with clearness and force. My ex- 
perience was similar in listening to conversations, 
in what has been called "the most general forum 
of popular discussion" in America, the smoking 
cars, on my long railway journeys. In these 
numerous and prolonged conversations I never 
heard but one opinion expressed, and vigorously 
expressed. In talking elsewhere with business and 

and Dr. Lynch. I had also the honour of speaking along 
with M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, Col. Azan 
of the French Military Mission, Lieut. Le Man of the 
Belgian Army, and Mr. P. D. Wilson, New York 
representative of the "Daily News." 



226 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

professional men I found that while most of them 
had sympathised with the Allies from the first, 
some had felt doubts and some had had a strong 
prejudice for Germany, but only till America 
entered the war. Now they were all of one mind 
without reservations. 

I had the honour of being invited by the 
Speaker to address the House of Representatives 
in the Legislature of the State of Massachusetts. 
I spoke, and I have no doubt that they listened, 
with memories of all that Boston has stood for in 
America's case against Britain. But their cordial 
reception of the British message was another 
proof of the common conscience of our peoples 
and of the American unanimity on the justice of 
our cause. The same proof, but on a larger scale, 
was given by the Great Convention in Philadelphia 
in May, called by the "League to Enforce Peace" 
by winning the war, and presided over by Mr. W. 
H. Taft. Three thousand delegates from all the 
States in the Union enthusiastically applauded the 
call to the duty of concentrating the national ef- 
forts and resources on the war as the only way to 
secure the freedom and the peace of the world — 
a call that rang throughout the proceedings from 
the Chairman's opening address to the closing ban- 



EPILOGUE 227 

quets at which he spoke for America, Ambassador 
Jusserand for France, and (in the absence of 
Lord Reading) I for the British people. The 
popular convictions and enthusiasm which this 
Convention expressed received official endorse- 
ment, no less hearty, at a meeting of the Gov- 
ernors of the States held at the same time, and 
also under the presidency of Mr. Taft. 

Of course there were and are in the United 
States, as in Great Britain, those of another opin- 
ion. But they are more silent in America than 
here, and the public show less tolerance with 
them. One discovery of this was interesting. A 
citizen of a large town in the Middle West showed 
me beneath his coat a badge, which marked him 
as one of a group of citizens, voluntarily and 
secretly organised to detect and expose to the 
authorities any whom they found talking treason 
to the nation's conscience of its duty; and it was 
said that there were similar groups in other cities. 
The trials of "conscientious objectors" and of 
unpatriotic agitators, with the verdicts and sen- 
tences passed on them, were also significant of the 
national temper. I found some audiences — few 
indeed — somewhat heavier to lift than others, and 
was told afterwards that they contained a consid- 



228 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

erable proportion of "pacifists". This happened 
chiefly in parts of the country where there is a 
vogue for religious theories that tend, through 
false ideas of the Divine Will, to weaken man's 
sense of his own responsibility for justice and the 
betterment of the world. We were seldom inter- 
rupted by objectors^ — once, I think, on the question 
of Ireland, but before we knew what they wished 
to say they were (to our disappointment) 
promptly ejected by the audience. The messages 
of my fellow-speakers and myself (I hope) were 
delivered with sobriety and restraint, yet the con- 
sent to what we said was always enthusiastic and 
In some cases its expression was overwhelming. 
Of the two related subjects on which I was 
charged to speak, the moral aims common to the 
Allies and the British part in the war, I found 
less need for the first than for the second. As' 
has often been said both by themselves and by 
others, Americans, with all their supposed absorp- 
tion in the material interests of life, are a nation 
of idealists. They have been so from the begin- 
ning. The nation came into being for an ideal; 
and the spirit of its Declaration of Independence 
and of other utterances during the War of Inde- 
pendence is hard to distinguish from that of the 



EPILOGUE 229 

contemporary idealists of France. Though much 
of the immigration which has constantly aug- 
mented the population has been due to material 
attractions, there have always gleamed over these 
attractions, as there have been signal to the minds 
of all the other immigrants, high ideals of free- 
dom and equality. To-day this national spirit has 
found consummate expression in the pronounce- 
ments of President Wilson. But American ideal- 
ism is not abstract. It has a practical edge upon 
it, and a personal passion driving behind the edge, 
not excelled by other nations. Up to a point the 
Americans are the most patient and amiable of 
peoples. But let the point be passed and not even 
the French will outdo them in the logical thorough- 
ness and eager, stern temper in which they will en- 
force these ideals. This does not mean that the 
American temper is vindictive ; but where its ideals 
of freedom are menaced and in real danger — and 
where the menacing forces have violated in addi- 
tion the sanctity of the home and have outraged 
women and children — then American idealism be- 
comes relentless and implacable. That is the 
spirit Germany has to encounter in the American 
soldier, and that is the spirit I have found resolute 
in his people behind him. 



230 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

Among Germany's most fatal blunders has 
been her failure to appreciate all this. In essence 
the moral aim of America at war is just that of 
her Allies. But it is somewhat differently set from 
theirs. We British had our definite and sworn 
duty to Belgium to concentrate and inflame us; 
behind that our instincts of danger to our Empire 
and its free institutions. To France there was 
the immediate and urgent task of repelling in- 
vasion; behind that the hope of recovering her 
lost provinces. Italy also had concrete aims, the 
recovery of territories and populations properly 
her own. And Belgians, Serbs and Montenegrins 
have been fighting for their soil and the restora- 
tion of their banished peoples. But while all these 
objectives of our warfare have been unselfishly 
adopted by the Americans, their ultimate target 
has been the autocracy itself, whose power and 
ambition were the primal, if not the sole, causes 
of the wrongs the Allies were called to redress. 
The Americans have aimed at this target with a 
straighter vision, at least, than the other AUied 
powers. In the President's words their purpose is 
"to make the world safe for democracy". As one 
went through the country one heard this and simi- 
larly absolute phrases repeated again and again. 



EPILOGUE 231 

Now in years of peace such phrases — even with 
the piquancy added to them of America's tradi- 
tional suspicion and contempt for all dynasties — 
felt monotonously abstract. So long as democracy 
was not threatened in America herself, and 
America had neither the power nor the concern 
to enforce it in Europe, American persistence in 
repeating its maxims seemed futile; and it was 
easy to caricature them as Charles Dickens did. 
When, however, the American as well as other 
democracies fell under real danger — when it was 
seen that Germany was making the world unsafe 
for democracy — and at the same time America 
felt herself able to strike as far as Europe, then 
her ideals took the form of a most practical pas- 
sion and their enforcement to the very letter of her 
phrasing of them became certain. A frequent 
signal of that temper which we heard was the say- 
ing — "it is this wretched kaiser-business that is 
responsible for the war, and it must be put an 
end to". 

From Count Bernstorff's and his master's con- 
temptuous references to the American Govern- 
ment and people on to even Prince Max's first 
communication to the President, Germany's stupid 
blindness to all this has been very obvious to those 



232 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

who know the Americans. It will be regarded as 
one of "the curiosities of history" that Imperial 
Germany, from whatever motive, should have ad- 
dressed her appeal for peace to that power among 
those opposed to her whose purpose was most 
directly hostile to her autocratic genius and con- 
stitution, and who at the same time was most 
familiar with the intrigues and falsehoods of her 
diplomacy. But President Wilson's replies to 
Prince Max must at last have roused Germans to 
the truth, that among all the Allies the American 
spirit strikes straightest at the heart of what the 
world has come to know as Germanism ; and that 
American vision, sharpened by two and a half 
years' experience of German fraud, is at least not 
less likely than that of the other Allies to be on 
guard in negotiations with a people whom their 
own conduct has rendered so suspect and untrust- 
worthy. 

On the other side of the task with which I was 
entrusted — to relate the part which Great Britain 
had played in the war — there was more need to 
enlarge. The magnitude of that part and many of 
its details were either unknown or imperfectly 
realised. For instance, the facts that, within two 
years from her sudden call to war and before 



EPILOGUE 233 

conscription was fully established, Great Britain 
had increased her armies from a few hundreds 
of thousands to nearly five millions; that these 
armies had to fight not on one front only 
but on seven or eight in three different con- 
tinents; or the distance from home of some 
of these fronts; or the size and severity of 
the operations upon them; or the number 
from first to last of British casualties. There 
was, too, great eagerness to hear how we con- 
veyed, fed and equipped our forces, and how they 
were served by the Royal Army Medical Corps 
and Red Cross; how Great Britain financed her- 
self and her Allies, and carried on other necessary 
organisations behind the fighting lines. It was 
a simple task to tell all this. Facts and figures 
told themselves.^ But the impression they pro- 
duced, often rising to amazement, showed how 

^ I was much indebted to the Department of Informa- 
tion of the British Foreign Office, in particular to Pro- 
fessor MacNeile Dixon there, and to the British Pic- 
torial Service in New York under Geoffrey Butler, Esq., 
for the literature, statistics, and other information with 
which they provided me. We found frequent proofs all 
over the States of the value of the literature on the 
British aims and results, distributed by Professor Mac- 
Neile Dixon. 



234 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

necessary the telling was. The first month of my 
tour was the time when the Third Liberty Loan 
was being raised, and the example of the subscrip- 
tions of British towns to our own last Government 
Loan was not without its influence. 

But while there was need for such detailed in- 
formation it must not be supposed that the dele- 
gates to America from a people, whether British 
or French, who have endured the sacrifices of 
these terrible years, had to work up sympathy in 
their audiences. Alike in the East, the Middle 
West, the Far West, and the South, the sympathy 
was spontaneous and immediate. Chambers of 
Commerce and other gatherings of business men 
were as moved as meetings of Church workers, 
men of German origin as much as Anglo-Saxons 
or the groups of Scots whom one found every- 
where. The audiences were ready to receive us 
with heartiness just because we were British or 
French or Italian or Belgian. It was a novel ex- 
perience to hear gatherings of American people 
singing "God Save the King" ; the words of which 
were in many cases thoughtfully distributed among 
them on leaflets; to listen to choirs trained to ren- 
der the more difficult "Rule Britannia"; and to 
speak from platforms on which the Union Jack 



EPILOGUE 235 

hung side by side with the Stars and Stripes — not 
to speak of the flags and national anthems of the 
other Alhes. The Americans are a generous 
people, and responded at once to what my fellow- 
speakers said of the British and French contribu- 
tions to our common cause. The finest tribute to 
Great Britain's part in the war, which I heard or 
read, was made by Mr. Taft in a great speech 
at Cleveland, Ohio, listened to by the most promi- 
nent men and women of that city. He said, in so 
many words, that America could never repay her 
debt to Britain, and his words were warmly ap- 
plauded. On 4th August, 191 8, the anniversary 
of the British entry into the war, ample acknowl- 
edgment was made in the daily papers and from 
the pulpits of the country of the critical and de- 
cisive consequences of that entry. The following 
extracts from a leading article may be regarded 
as typical : — ^ 

"Because England weighed a promise and 
not the price of keeping it, there could be no 
swift stroke at lone France, no dash eastward 
to subdue Russia. . . . 

"England's day this? Yes, and a glorious 

^"The Sun," New York, Sunday, 4th August, 19 18. 



236 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

anniversary for her. She has indeed kept her 
'solid engagement to do her utmost'. In a 
million graves are men of the British Empire, 
who did not consider the price at which the 
compact would be kept. Their lives for a scrap 
of paper — and welcome! When we think 
that we are winning the war — and nobody de- 
nies that It Is American men and food and ships 
and guns that are winning it now — let us look 
back to the 4th of August, 19 14, and remem- 
ber what nation it was that stood between the 
beast and his prey, scorning all his false offers 
of kindness to Belgium, his promises not to 
hate France, and his hypocritical cry of 'kin- 
dred nation' to the England he really hated. 
"But it is not alone England's day. . . . 
It is the anniversary of Germany's loss of 
the war." 
To one who has known America for the last 
twenty-five years all these signs — and they could 
be indefinitely multiplied — form evidence of a 
change In the attitude and temper of Americans 
towards the people and Government of Great 
Britain. It Is Important to notice that the change 
Is not due to a revival of considerations of blood 
or language or even community of political heri- 



EPILOGUE 237 

tage, but rests far more happily on a common 
conscience and a community of ideals. We heard 
little these months of an "Anglo-Saxon Alliance" 
or a "League of English-speaking peoples". As 
the years go on less and less stress can be laid on 
the physical kinship of us British to the people 
of the United States. The proportion of gen- 
uine "Anglo-Saxons" to the mass of the popula- 
tion is steadily diminishing. The mingling of 
races and bloods in the United States is a more 
wonderful commonplace than ever. To our minds 
it was brought home in several vivid ways. In 
the lists of drafted men published in the papers 
of each district the sum of English, Scottish, and 
Irish names would be conspicuously less than the 
sum of German, Jewish, Italian, Polish, Russian 
and other Slavonic names. In camps and troop- 
ships numbers of soldiers would look at you with 
the same blue eyes, round faces and fair hair that 
you were familiar with on the German prisoners 
in France. Again, I remember, that when we 
were passing through Arizona a journal gave the 
"foreign-born" groups, which the Mayor of a 
small town was adding to the Committee for the 
celebration of Independence Day. No fewer than 
fourteen different nationalities were represented. 



^38 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

But these are not all. On a schedule attached to 
our steamer tickets were the names of the nations, 
from one or other of which the American pas- 
senger had to declare he was derived, and those 
names are over forty — nearly as many nations as 
there are States in the Union. It is the richest 
mixture of nations that history knows. Though 
it carries the people further from the cradle we 
shared with them, we British cannot grudge it. 
We ourselves, in a smaller way, are a mixture too. 
The strength and quality of our genius depend on 
the fact that we are not only Anglo-Saxons — 
praise be to God! — but Norse and Norman, 
French, Celtic, and much else beside. We should 
contemplate the ethnic experiment in the United 
States, on a vastly larger scale, with a hopeful- 
ness justified by our own experience and more 
than sufficient to compensate for the rapid disso- 
lution by foreign bloods of our kinship with the 
American people. But the war gives both them 
and us something greater still. The stern sense 
and the strenuous practice of their duty to so just 
a cause is doing more to consolidate this dazzling 
variety of peoples into one nation than anything 
else could have done. And not only for both our 
nations is it far more precious that we should be 



EPILOGUE 239 

united by a common conscience than merely by ties 
of blood or language; but it is also far better for 
humanity as a whole. That, through the greatest 
crisis which has ever fallen on civilisation, we 
have seen with one eye, and have fought, suffered, 
and our sons have died, together for the Right is 
the pledge not only that our Alliance shall endure, 
but that it is certain to secure through the centuries 
the moral stability and peace of the whole world. 
But this fresh spiritual union does not lose 
the ancient buttresses of a common language and 
a common political heritage. Our language is an 
invaluable bond. In politics the service has been 
reciprocal. Americans are fully conscious of the 
debt they owe to England and Scotland for their 
political principles and liberal institutions; and 
we can never forget the lessons of liberty, which 
they taught us when they broke from our tyran- 
nous monarchy, and which we have laid to heart 
in the building of our Empire. I encountered 
many curious instances of their prejudice against 
that word "Empire," and endeavoured to show 
how we had redeemed it from its evil associations 
and given it new contents and a new spirit. I had 
also some pleasure in quoting the fact that George 
Washington did not refuse the name to the Ameri- 



240 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

can Commonwealth, as when he called himself 
"a member of an infant Empire".^ The truth is 
that the spirit and form of the British Empire — 
that commonwealth of independent states and 
semi-independent territories — are nearer to those 
of the great Federal Republic than are even the 
spirit and constitution of the United Kingdom. 
Sometimes in the Western States we had ques- 
tions put to us which revealed suspicions as to the 
degree and quality of the British democracy. It 
was easy to answer that whatever be its draw- 
backs, we are, in some directions at least, more 
democratic than our republican kinsmen. Neither 
in State nor in Church nor in the University do 
our constitutions leave so much power to individ- 
ual men. Our administration Is not so indepen- 
dent of Parliament as the American is of 
Congress ; the American caucuses are controlled by 
"bosses" of a power hardly known to us. There 
are more labour members in Parliament than in 
Congress. Bishops in one Protestant Church 
seem to have authority peculiarly drastic, and 
some College Presidents are said to exercise 
powers which, If their British equivalents assumed 
them, would rouse an academic revolution. 
* Letter to Lafayette, 15th August, 1786. 



EPILOGUE 241 

I was asked by a very eminent private citizen, 
who has filled one of the highest educational posi- 
tions in the States and has been called to one of 
the most important of their political posts, 
whether "England was going Socialist". Scotico 
more I inquired why he put the question. He an- 
swered, "Because, if it does, it will wreck any 
British-American alliance". Whether he is right 
or wrong, he represents an attitude toward Social- 
ism held by many Americans. Socialism has less 
vogue than with us. That is partly because the 
position of the wage-earners is more comfortable, 
but partly also because the American conception 
of freedom is at least as jealous for the rights of 
the individual as concerned with the idea of equal- 
ity. Equality of opportunity certainly, but leave 
the individual as free as possible in his use of the 
opportunity and in his enjoyment of the results of 
his use. 

This is perhaps one of the lines on which may be 
found the answer to a question that haunts the 
British visitor to America : what are the differences 
between the temper of our democracy and that 
of the American? One may be this individualism 
of the American temper; due possibly to the 



242 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

greater alertness and more mobile energy of the 
individual, about which in their turn it would be 
interesting to inquire whether the climate or the 
greater initiative encouraged in children, both in 
their families and at school, was at all responsible 
for them. Another difference it may be more rash 
to suggest — ^that while the American mind is more 
rapt away by the idea of Freedom, we British are 
more content with the slower steps of Justice. 
But such generalisations are precarious — and after 
all Freedom and Justice are parallel infinites. 

Great as was the sympathy and even enthusiasm 
with which the British message and record were 
received at our meetings, I am bound to say that 
the sympathy and enthusiasm for the name of 
France were, if possible, still greater. In the 
streets the Tricolor was more lavish than the 
Union Jack; and at concerts (though there was 
an intrinsic reason also for this) the "Marseil- 
laise" was greeted more heartily than "God save 
the King". And we British did not grudge all 
this, when we remembered the histories of those 
two peoples — that France was America's first ally, 
sending troops and munitions across the Atlantic 
as America is now sending them to France; how 



EPILOGUE 243 

disinterested the first French assistance had been/ 
and how effective the whole of it proved to the 
achievement of victory; how American Indepen- 
dence had re-acted for the freedom of France; 
how intimate and affectionate had been the inter- 
course between the great men of the two nations 
in those heroic days; and that to-day both states 
are republics. It is surely natural that there 
should be in America's feeling toward France a 
strain of an even more tender quality than in her 
feelings towards ourselves. After all, the three 

^ In his recent volume "With Americans of Past and 
Present Days" (Scribner's Sons, 191 7), M. Jusserand 
brings out great evidence of this. And Frenchmen dis- 
claimed any wish to get Canada back by American help. 
At the same time there is little doubt that Louis XVFs 
statesmen hoped to take great advantage at sea and in 
commerce by the American success. At the Philadelphia 
Banquet of the League to Enforce Peace on 17th May 
last, M. Jusserand made a very pretty point. He read 
a letter from a general at the front dated ist May, say- 
ing that the position was critical, and urging that all 
available troops be sent immediately to his help across 
the Atlantic. When we who listened felt sobered by 
this appeal, M. Jusserand quietly said: "Do not worry, 
it is true that the date of the letter was the first of May, 
but the year is 1781 and the writer General George 
Washington." 



244 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

are one by the holiest ties of duty and of sacrifice, 
and equally appreciate each other's spirit and ef- 
forts. The question of Benjamin Franklin has 
been answered in fact: "What would you think 
of a proposition if I sh'd make it of a family com- 
pact between England, France, and America? 
America would be as happy as the Sabine girl if 
she could be the means of uniting in perpetual 
peace her father and her husband."^ The com- 
pact is made, and has the assurance of its per- 
petuity in the community of moral aims on which 
it rests. 

To their Italian Allies the sympathy of the 
Americans has gone forth possibly in a less demon- 
strative but not in a less sincere fashion than to 
the French. I had not the opportunity of hearing 
any Italian speakers, but the most interesting spec- 
tacle I witnessed was of "Italian Day" in New 
York, the anniversary of Italy's entrance into the 
war. For most of its great length Fifth 
Avenue was lined by a crowd four or five deep of 
Italian citizens of the Republic waving the colours 
of their fatherland, their children seated at their 

^To David Hartley, one of the British plenipoten- 
tiaries for the peace, dated i6th October, 1783; quoted 
by M. Jusserand, op. cit., p. 348. 



EPILOGUE 245 

feet on the kerbs of the side-walks. I shall never 
forget the lines of olive, Tuscan and Roman faces 
along those pavements of the West. New York 
Is said to contain an Italian population as large 
as Rome. 

It Is Impossible to treat with adequacy the com- 
plexities of the domestic German-American situ- 
ation created by the war. Nothing need now be 
said of the careful German propaganda in the 
States during these four years, and long before 
war broke out, or of the insidious Intrigue and 
abuse of America's hospitality, or of the violations 
of their new allegiance by some German Immi- 
grants, which have exasperated the Republic. 
Their criminal character is familiar, though per- 
haps not to the same degree, to every nation on 
which Germany had set her calculating eye. But 
apart from these outrages, the way to deal with 
which was obvious and has been sternly pursued, 
the situation of Americans of German origin was 
one peculiarly involved and delicate. The Re- 
public could not forget the steadfast and often 
heroic service rendered by her German citizens 
to the cause of Union throughout the Civil War; 
yet had reason to be anxious about the attitude of 
their successors in the very different crisis of to- 



246 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

day. For this war has drawn the millions of 
Americans who are German by birth or descent 
into a hard conflict between, on the one side, tra- 
dition and natural affection, and, on the other, 
their new allegiance and the rights of a cause 
whose justice was acclaimed by the rest of the 
civilised world. A visit to the States is bound to 
create a sympathy with the German families and 
individuals who must have felt the agony of that 
conflict; as well as to give the capacity of appre- 
ciating the honesty and courage of the great mass 
of them who have emerged from it whole-hearted 
for the Allies — yet not with hearts wholly healed 
as they see to what the people, from which they 
have been proud to spring, has been reduced by 
its own conduct. All honour to them! 

Next to the anxiety with which I faced my first 
week of meetings — in New York and Philadel- 
phia — in ignorance still of the precise angle at 
which Americans at war should be addressed, was 
that I felt on approaching the principal German 
centres in the country. But it was needless. The 
meetings in these cities, such as Cincinnati, St. 
Louis and Milwaukee, were as enthusiastic as else- 
where. Several of the chairmen were of German 
origin, and large numbers of those to whom we 



EPILOGUE 247 

were introduced bore German names. But they 
were all loyal Americans, and spoke for or cheered 
the Allied Cause as vigorously as their fellow- 
countrymen. The Lichnowsky Memorandum had 
powerful effects. When it appeared the editors of 
a leading German paper in the Middle West 
acknowledged that they had been misled by the 
authorities and journals of Berlin and announced 
that, dropping the German name of their paper, 
they would henceforth support the aims of the 
Allies. Another paper, protesting against being 
classed as *^un-American" because it used the Ger- 
man language, asserted its loyalty to "America's 
war-aims," without, however, referring to the 
other Allies. There has been strong controversy 
over the teaching and use of German, the strenu- 
ousness of the hostility to which we cannot 
appreciate unless we realise conditions that 
do not exist among ourselves. In the State of 
Nebraska, for example, there appear to have been 
hundreds of schools in which the general instruc- 
tion was not only given In German, but was In- 
spired by German traditions and ideals. In St. 
Louis and Its suburbs there are twenty-eight 
Evangelical-Lutheran churches, twenty-eight Ger- 
man-Evangelical churches, and seventeen Ger- 



248 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

man-Catholic. By April last twenty-two of the 
"parish schools" of the first named had discon- 
tinued instruction in German, and six or seven of 
the congregations had ceased to use the language 
in their services. On the other hand, the Catholic 
Archbishop, affirming that no complaint of dis- 
loyalty in any St. Louis church had reached him, 
protested that "we are not making war on lan- 
guages but on false principles," and added that 
"as a rule only one of the Sunday sermons is in 
German," but "he had the question of eliminating 
German under consideration."^ There and else- 
where some churches changed their names from 
German to English. It is said that the number of 
students of German in the universities has seri- 
ously diminished. These things show how far 
conditions in the States differ from those in Great 
Britain. 

Other elements in America at war deserve our 
attention, among them the Negroes and the Red 
Indians. 

I had the privilege of speaking to audiences of 
coloured men and women in the South and of 
hearing several of their speakers. At a meeting 

^St. Louis "Post Despatch," 17th April, 1918; cf. 
"Denver Post," Sunday, 21st April. 



EPILOGUE 249 

in New Orleans the pastors to whom we were in- 
troduced had already soldier sons in France. 
There are separate contingents of negroes in the 
American forces; and a number of commissions 
have been given to them. I had the pleasure of 
telling those meetings that I had seen men of their 
race in three of the uniforms of the Allies, in the 
British khaki a West Indian Regiment, in the 
French blue a Senegal Regiment, both on the front 
in France, and now an American in the U.S. uni- 
form. This cannot be said of any other race 
save the Jews. It was interesting and pathetic 
to hear negro speakers exhort their brothers to 
support the Allied Cause as "Anglo-Saxons"; 
which term they justified because as a race they 
had never known any civilisation but the Anglo- 
Saxon, and this war was one for its ideals against 
the pagan ideals and policy of Germanism. In 
this crisis the coloured communities in America 
have the same conscience as the white, and one 
heard numerous instances of their fine proof of 
this in the readiness of their sons to fight, and of 
their men and women to subscribe to the Govern- 
ment Loans and the Red Cross. The zeal of 
many was inflamed by the evidence of how the 



250 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

natives in Africa have been treated by German 
colonists. 

The Red-Indians are also "on the warpath." In 
the States there are fewer than 33,000 males of 
this race of military age, but by May "6000 of 
them were in the Army, 85 per cent of whom were 
volunteers, and several hundred more in the Navy, 
every one a full citizen."^ They are found in 
every rank, from that of Major downwards. One 
company of the 142nd Infantry is composed 
wholly of Choctaws, all volunteers. We saw 
several Indian sergeants in companies of white 
soldiers, and they deserved the rank both for their 
stalwart frames and the military education they 
had previously received at Government Schools. 
"At Camp Travis in the 358th Infantry Regi- 
ment it is said that every company has its Indian 
non-commissioned officers. No race in the States 
has a better Liberty Bond record . . . they are 
not the wealthiest people, but on the three loans 
they have managed to subscribe more than thir- 
teen million of dollars." Their engagement in 

^ The total Indian population of the U. S. is just on 
336,000, about half of them citizens, 50,000 still in skins 
and blankets, and only 30 per cent able to read and write 
English. (From a daily paper.) 



EPILOGUE 251 

the war has included some picturesque incidents. 
In Washington and Oregon several tribes appealed 
to a clause in the treaties of 1854-5 by which they 
agreed "never to make war against any other tribe 
except in self-defence" ; but "when Government ex- 
plained that this really was a war of self-defence 
they decided readily enough that those savage 
tribes over in Germany needed the Indian sign 
more than the Iron Cross." Another tribe, the 
Onondagas, drew up a declaration of war against 
the Kaiser under their treaty with George Wash- 
ington, which made them a separate nation. They 
took this step because of the indignities inflicted 
by the Germans on some of their tribe taken 
prisoners. The race has already rendered its 
sacrifices for the Cause, and in Shawano County 
and other districts with ancient Indian names, aged 
women, in accordance with tribal custom, have 
been wailing for their men fallen in France.^ 

We had frequent opportunity for feeling the 
weight of the reasons which have been urged for 
the delay of America's entry into the war, and 
which even kept some portions of her population 
indifferent to our Cause for a year thereafter. 
On the question, whether the President could have 

^ "New York Sunday Times," 4th August, 1918. 



2'52 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

brought in a united people at any earlier stage, 
American opinion itself is divided. But to an 
"outlander" like myself, and even though I began 
my work in the country when the last German 
offensive and the first considerable lists of Amer- 
ican casualties were rousing the States, and Prince 
Lichnowsky's memorandum was dispelling alt 
doubts of Germany's guilt, the difficulties which 
had retarded the national opinion and resolution 
were still very apparent. They are known to the 
world. There is the extraordinary mixture of 
races in the American nation described above. 
There is the distance especially of the Middle and 
the Far West from the fields of war. How 
slowly instruction travels and conviction grows 
across these vast spaces, may be seen from what 
I was told of the difference between the apathy 
of the trans-Mississippi farmers to the first two 
Liberty Loans and the zeal with which they 
responded to the Third. There were the old and 
once very wise traditions of the national duty to 
hold aloof from European quarrels; and the 
patience required to learn that this war is one not 
for Europe only but for humanity. And there 
was (to a less extent) the natural gratitude of 
many pure Americans to German learning and 



EPILOGUE 253 

German training. But obvious as these factors 
are, it is necessary for a foreigner to revisit 
America and to move up and down among her 
people in order to realise their force and the con- 
sequent reasonableness of the American delay. 
And (as I have said in the first of the addresses) 
the delay has brought our Cause this moral ad- 
vantage, that when the American decision to fight 
came about it was a very deliberate decision, and 
accepted by practically the whole people after a 
thorough experience of the German mind, and 
only when through two and a half years they had 
proved the futility of treating with that mind on 
any other footing except that of war. The de- 
layed decision was a vindication and reinforce- 
ment of our own original and necessarily swifter 
conscience of the justice of our Cause. 

It is unnecessary to write of the evidence con- 
stantly before our eyes that the Americans are 
following up their convictions and enthusiasm for 
that Cause, by a strenuous and unselfish organisa- 
tion of their manhood and mobilisation of their 
material resources. The people are engrossed, 
the land is loud, with the preparations for war. 
The results already spread vastly — in that cease- 
less stream of men across the Atlantic, in the 



g54 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

two millions now in France, and in the huge con- 
structions behind them there of docks and quays, 
of railways and roads, of stores of food and am- 
munition, of camps, hospitals and schools. I may 
speak safely now of the great convoy with which 
we returned to Britain. Eleven ships carried over 
thirty-six thousand American infantry, the staff of 
a Division, and a host of military nurses, besides 
heavy cargoes. We were escorted by United 
States warships till we met a small fleet of British 
destroyers that saw us safely into port — a proof 
of the hearty, vigilant and punctual co-operation 
of the two navies. The food control in America 
since the war began has been well organised and 
loyally obeyed. Americans have, of course, not 
yet felt the extremities to which the French and 
British have been reduced by four years of war; 
and on so great a continent they never will. But 
this makes all the more conspicuous their recent 
gift to their allies of one hundred and twenty- 
six million bushels of wheat, over and above their 
usual exports and saved from their own consump- 
tion between January and June last. We saw 
the process at work. Hotels, restaurants, dining- 
cars all loyally followed Mr. Hoover's request to 
save meat, wheat, and other foods. The volume 



EPILOGUE 255 

of the gift has been swollen by rills from prac- 
tically every home in the United States ; and it is 
this even more than its volume which renders 
the gift so precious. Of the shipbuilding we saw 
in yards old and new along both the Atlantic and 
Pacific coasts, and even in creeks far up the coun- 
try where the ribs of wooden vessels rose above 
the primeval trees ;^ of the ubiquitous munition 
works and works of every other article of war, 
and of the almost endless processions of freight 
trains working eastward I cannot now write. 

I can only say that it has been a privilege and 
inspiration to see a great and a generous people 
thus roused by their conscience and deliberate 
study of the facts to an unselfish war in the inter- 
ests of justice and freedom to all mankind. 

I had the honour of being received by President 
Woodrow Wilson. In the course of our conver- 
sation he spoke chiefly of those moral aims of the 
Allies of which he has proved so clear and im- 
pressive an interpreter. His final words were: 
"Be sure to tell your people, that when the time 
comes for settling the terms of peace, we must con- 
tinue to be true to the ideals which have inspired 

^ So one morning on the borders of Louisiana and 
Texas. 



256 OUR COMMON CONSCIENCE 

our warfare — that each of the Allied nations 
must preserve through those negotiations a na- 
tional unselfishness and disinterestedness. Other- 
wise we cannot face the young men whom we have 
taught and trained and sent forth to fight for 
these high principles." 



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